Let me preface this by saying that I’m probably posting the following out of vanity. Sometimes it’s simply hard to resist the temptation to use a personal blog as a way to show off one’s achievements. Sue me. 

But also, as a writer/maker of things who is well aware of her infinitesimal place in the universe and who regularly comes up against other people’s indifference, sometimes a little reassurance is everything. I’m not saying art is hard. I’m just saying that when you make things, you become dangerously sensitive: you open a valve so you can send out your own truths, and external nastiness inevitably tends to find its way in.

Therefore, to stay sane, sometimes you just have to put your accomplishments up on the fridge for everyone to see. 

Anyway, Orchises publisher Roger Lathbury wrote this blurb/statement about my poetry book for the Wells College Press website. I opened the email about it right about 30 seconds after I woke up, and let me tell you, if you ever have the opportunity to start your day off on the receiving end of effusive praise, I highly recommend it.

What Longing Is introduces a fresh, commanding talent. Janis Esch’s poetry is confident and faceted, with ominous glints in growing turbulences, where “heat lightning spark[s] distant clouds.” It is finely paced to sustain the humming tension of its vision, which as it persists reveals the quiet terror of vacancy. “Vultures” in particular has a grandeur and an authority that for an instant makes one stop breathing: how to go further? Given the riches of this short, beautifully produced chapbook, I feel certain that Janis Esch will do so and as she continues will take many of us with her.

I don’t know whether it’s the receding hemlines, the foliage that thrums with frenzied new life everywhere I look, or the fact that I now own a convertible, but I feel about five to seven years younger now that the winter of my discontent has passed. 

This winter sucked. It was unnaturally long, bitter, severe, and almost bipolar enough to feel downright apocalyptic (thanks, climate change). Maybe this is just par for the course now that we’ve managed to fuck up the atmosphere on an eschatological scale, but if so, I’d rather risk catching malaria in some sticky tropical clime than have to endure “ice pellet” storms, sudden blizzards, and general meteorological volatility for six months of the year for the rest of my life. Fuck that. I’m gonna have mai tais in the Philippines. 

Miraculously, however, I appear to have come out on the other side of this massive case of Seasonal Affective Fuckery and I’m ready to get back into the hustle. 

I think part of the reason for my six-month-long bout of the mean reds (besides the darkness and coldness and nosebleed-inducing dryness and OH GOD PLEASE LET IT BE OVER) is that I’ve fallen out of step with my old rhythms of creativity. It’s alarming how quickly that can happen, and it’s alarming how much it can mess with my overall sense of self-worth. I guess the main thing I’ve learned from the past serotonin-deprived season is that I truly feel terrible when I’m not making things. 

These feelings came to a head in an emotional shitstorm of epic proportions recently. After the short-term lease for our tiny shack ended a month ago, Marshall more or less convinced me that moving back into his dad’s place would be a good idea, saying we could fix up the unfinished part of the house as an independent apartment and save a ton of money. I acquiesced, maybe not wanting to admit that I’m super fussy about my living spaces.

He was saddled with taking care of the move while I sojourned back to my alma mater to give a reading, and when I got back, things were in disarray. Because our apartment-to-be was currently a storage space that needed to be sanded, painted, and cleaned, we had to live in the dark, damp cellar in the meantime, and all our belongings were scattered all over the place. It was tough to move around in all the clutter, and something as simple as finding a shirt to wear became a 30-minute ordeal. 

I don’t mean to bitch. I admire Marshall for being able to maintain a sense of inner calm no matter where he is—truly. I just don’t share that aptitude. 

Tempers flared; resentments stewed; I felt utterly helpless. Thankfully, I have a compassionate behavioral therapist for a mother and a hard-nosed, whip-smart lady for a best friend, and they both basically told me, “Duh, move out. Ain’t no thang.”  

I think I’m at my best when I’m living alone, when I have time for self-cultivation and creativity, when I can be the empress of my own little dominion. I’m sure it stems from having an authoritarian father, but I have a tough time flourishing when I have to share decisions with a dude. I have hope that eventually I’ll be able to enjoy the egalitarian nature of that, but right now it just inevitably makes me feel trapped. 

Convincing my boyfriend that my desire to get my own place has nothing to do with our relationship and will ultimately help rather than hinder it is … ongoing. I can’t fault him for being dubious about it. But I need room to breathe, write, regain some goddamn agency, and clear my head. That’s why getting my own bachelorette pad will be the first order of business for the summer. 

Meanwhile, I’m heading down to Texas this week with my awesome gal pal Christina to attend Kerrville Folk Festival. I’ve got a feeling that the travel and new experience will jump-start some creativity. Here’s hoping.

I’ll probably be coming here more often to get into the habit of writing again, so until next time… .

XO,

Janis

I’m of a blighted brain—there’s
a black blot of rain where it counts.
It’s a fork-tongued fortune:
clear-eyed and clamorous,
I skirt reality’s gunmetal edge with one foot
in the blue beyond, shocked stupid
by the immenseness of all I see.
I don’t mean there’s anything here
to glorify. It’s hard not to get caught in the crush
when the world prods some vital nerve
and I’m spread like a starfish on the cold table,
and joy and illumination and release aren’t so far, just waiting
to stream into capillaries and swamp neural pathways,
but what’s the point
when there’s this
this explosive awakening of wings and feathers and black-eyed fear,
this eruption of flight.

So this is how it goes
when the danger drops out
when the reckless rancor of youth turns tail and hides:
no awe-choked whispers
no thrill like the scent of an afternoon thunderstorm
no great clattering in the dark,
in the hot and humid dark,
when the streets are deserted and the spirit spreads out,
the spirit tinges fingertips and toes and hair with light,
trying to burst through;

no more, no more waiting, no more
listening for a memory on a hot summer wind, no more
prowling the shadows with a white-hot appetite… .

I watch these sunbrowned teens sharpen their teeth
in the cloven brick alleys, and I feel
bled out, unstoppered.

I sleep on my own side
and my skin stings endlessly,
notes too high to hear.

I feel the crash and cradle
of the sea in a black dream,
and I want to go under.

I’ve been nettled by time;
it hurts to move.

It goes without saying that most people hate Facebook but use it anyway. It’s like some kind of super-bacteria, always one step ahead of the curve, evolving too quickly for us to find a way to kill it. Maybe that’s what irks us. Or maybe it’s that we’re giving all our personal information away to an exploitative corporation, and we’re doing it willingly.

Or maybe it’s that Facebook comes with this whole weird etiquette because your parents and co-workers are on it and the conversation never really feels fulfilling, the virtual room always has this undertone of awkwardness and unease.

Or maybe it’s that we need to use it to feel relevant and part of the group (what group?).

Or maybe it’s that it forces us to see old friends who are our age getting married and having babies and we alternately deride and envy them for it.

Maybe it’s all those things. We’ve reached a weird point in human history—the village is now digital, the tribe is an assortment of icons, your wise elders are the ones who can’t pick up on your tongue-in-cheek typespeak. And you—you are a flattering picture put through a preset filter, you are your carefully crafted status posts.

It’s all terribly confusing. I’m honestly surprised more people aren’t jumping off bridges or eating each other’s faces. Because when you take away social order and supplant it with this chaotic network of endless information, how do you stay sane? Sure, “society” can be a lot of bad things (repressive, regressive, dogmatic, downright psychologically damaging), but when it’s working right, it can give us a model for life. It can teach us how to react when we come upon life’s big changes: the transition into adulthood, childbirth, child rearing, the gradual breakdown of the body, and eventually, death. How do we deal with these things, how do we know how to act in the face of life’s challenges, when we don’t have a cultural blueprint? 

We don’t. We’re making it up as we go along. What’s that tagline from Lena Dunham’s GIRLS, which is about confused twentysomethings living in a lawless urban environment? This season it’s Almost, kind of getting it together. Young people are starting from scratch, they’re making up their own rules, they don’t know how to interpret the difficulties of life, and God, is there anything harder? People say that show is about privileged white people, but it is really about this utterly perplexing brand of 21st century anomie you find today in places like New York City. And it is absolutely relevant. But I digress. 

Over the past few years, especially when I was living alone in New Orleans, I spent a lot of time semi-addicted to the internet, desperately seeking human connection. The term “addiction” here is apt, because, as bizarre as it sounds, you really do crave the thrill of getting that red notification alert on Facebook, or those linear “_____ is now following you” messages on Tumblr. “Someone out there in this vast, chaotic, informational ocean notices you and likes you!” they seem to say. And the jolt of validation is like a fix.

I know that many people derive much-needed solace and reassurance from internet communities. I think that’s a great thing—I guess I’m just saying, Be careful. You can lose yourself in the chaos, because the center of every online interaction is as hollow as a drum. I don’t think this is the internet’s fault—I think it’s just the way we’re wired, what our bodies have equipped us for. For our experiences to mean anything, they must be coupled with the sensory. If you were to ask me to describe a recent, powerful memory that will stay with me to the end, I wouldn’t say, “Talking to my friend on Gchat.” I’d say, “Getting drunk on Cafe Granada’s sangria with Krystal in New Orleans one late summer afternoon, laughing and laughing for hours like two old ladies, with the roar of St. Charles Avenue’s traffic in our ears.” (Okay, I don’t actually talk like that—that’d be annoying, wouldn’t it?)

So yes, this is all very confusing, yes, we need to come up with a new order of society that makes sense today and gives people the spiritual guidance they need, but in the meantime, don’t forget the power of your senses. In this sleek, streamlined, digital age we sometimes lose the power of the grit and gristle, the earthy, the imperfect. If you’re ever lost in the ones and zeroes, go hug somebody hard, look into their eyes and memorize the color. I promise that you’ll feel better, at least for a little while.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from a vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

-Thoreau

I figured that while I was here, leeching internet off SIU in their corporate-sponsored castle of a student center, riding the crest of a good coffee buzz, I would do a little blog-keeping.

So, things. Things equal good. I’m fully settled back into my rural Illinois routine, relishing the continuity, the simplicity, the damn-near ascetic poverty that is equal parts romantic and annoying. I’ve shed my travel weight since getting off the road, which is desirable. People say it’s cheaper to eat unhealthily, but the truth is that McDoubles are still less expensive than pan-fried broccoli stump shavings—a fact I know all too well.

When I say “poverty,” I’m not trying to be trendy, and I guess I should stipulate that it’s voluntary, that I’m lucky enough to be moderately well-educated and have all my teeth, that I don’t spend my afternoons stoking noxious-fume-emitting burn piles in the yard, which is more than I can say for my meth-addled neighbors. I guess it’s hard not to wear my Winter’s Bone living situation as a badge of authenticity, or tout it as street—er, dirt road—cred, but really the most important thing is that it has been, obviously, eye-opening. Living among the bottomfeeders has certainly called into question many of my former values, and underscored the importance of my new ones: found families, the struggle for excellence, daily walks, creative industriousness, the tendency for cheap box wine not to taste that much worse than the more expensive kinds. 

All that said, I am looking for part-time work, so that I can at least eat the broccoli top floret parts on a more consistent basis. Marshall just landed a gig at a locally-owned music store, and—knock on wood—maybe we’ll be able to afford one of the meth addict-friendly, Dharma Initiative-lookin’ cottages in our podunk neighborhood sometime soon. And hopefully, with the addition of our three new band members who all interchangeably play fiddle, mandolin, upright bass, dobro, and banjo, the Voyageurs will soon start playing bigger, more lucrative venues.

Anyway, I remain grateful to be here, and by here I mean the universe. At band practice with the new musicians last night, it occurred to me just how lucky I am to have this much music in my life. I’m surrounded by so many talented people, and they’re teaching me so much. Just this morning I got an email from local folk legend Hugh DeNeal (of the Woodbox Gang and Hobo Knife) asking us to open for him at the biggest venue in town. Tragically, we’ll be in California that night paying a Christmas visit to my parents, but hell, it’s still a step in the right direction.

XO,

Janis

I have decided, at this late hour, in this cramped tent, with you inches away snoring sickly (thanks to a low-grade cold, incurred sometime yesterday afternoon), that your mind is not a mirrored many-faceted gem, but a hard ore, like polished steel or copper. I never guessed I would love a man like you: sharp as a switch, simple as an inborn gift, effortlessly upright, so sure, so solid, so not-me. I think you know the world has a way of translating your voracious appetite for life and your bald enthusiasm to mean “shallow,” but I am endlessly delighted to discover the untruth of that assumption. Because you’re quick and capable, both feet always firmly in the corporeal. Your knowledge of the mechanics of life has a way of humbling me. You love history, and as a boy, how many novels did it take to ruin your eyesight? You have told me that when society collapses you will provide, and with a secret guilty Paleolithic thrill I have believed you, just as I believe you will continue to astonish me in all you do. I’ve spent countless sleepless nights next to you; I’ve heard you laugh and cry out in your sleep. You’ve recited to me your dreams and I know you have the subconscious of an eight-year-old boy, replete with dinosaurs and killer robots. I love you for it. I love you for how not-me you are, unhaunted by shadowy fears and weighty manifestations. Whatever hides in the folds of my psyche does not bear revisiting—but in the mornings you hold me against the false Yous who leave me, the false Yous who die in my arms. The world in all its beauty and tragedy impresses itself upon me—I’m too porous and soft—but you, incorruptible, impermeable, are part of it, an unexpected phenomenon, just because. You fell in love with a girl driven nearly to fits by an ill slant of light or a single creeping doubt, and she cycles you like a moon or sometimes like a predator, and still you stand and love her.

I wanted someone to give it all to. Even in the beginning,

I imagined an urn into which I’d pour a lifetime

of secret knowledge, dreams made remarkable by affection.

I wanted to be adored, achingly. I wanted someone to want

me to teach him to move

to thirst

to be unbearably unspent. I wanted a man to know

my ripe sweet scent among the herd,

to be unafraid of my fury. I wanted

not worship, or maybe worship, or maybe

just to be eyed appreciatively, spread-eagle under the stars,

made of muscle and some God-stuff with no name.

I wanted him, whoever, to love the way I roared

and wrestled, reared and bucked. I wanted him. That nobody.

But men don’t drink you in, not really. Men don’t want to match you.

Men don’t meet you in the ill-defined corners of your mind

where you’re a bundle of nerves,

a tangle of Christmas lights, a live wire.

They don’t want to find your eyes

in a channel of sunlight, they don’t want to look

for the beauty behind the bare face,

the life-shine under the skin.

And so there’s this: this root,

this bone-white tuber of a temper,

this brutal love that would extract a soul

from its pale surroundings, that would lift a beating heart

to high heaven, that would know a hiding man’s hunger

and praise it.

Let it stay there. Let it wait.

Summer’s here, and I’m checking out a little more each day, trading the observable world for some kind of Technicolor hyper-reality where everything pulses and sparks. I’ve lost touch with what’s expected of me and it doesn’t matter. All those unwritten social cues and nuances, the things holding the interpersonal framework in place—they’re bright scarves fluttering away from me in the wind. I let them fly. I start to answer someone’s question mid-sip. I wander away from group conversations to crane up at towering cumulous clouds. I unsettle acquaintances with overlong stares. I inhabit it all, drown in the now-ness.

I’m too dizzy-in-awe of the world, too happy, too earnest, too too.

I’ve felt this excessive joy before, back when I was starting my senior year of college and finally recovering from getting my heart good and broken for the first time. I was coming to realize, as all brokenhearted people eventually do, that the hurt will never be undone, that short of lobotomy or amnesia there is no road back to innocence, that the most we can hope for is a kind of dignified, battle-scarred awareness of the mettle we’re made of. But sometimes that knowledge leads to an even deeper peace. After a summer of lifting boxes in the walk-in freezer of the local country grocery, I was all sinew and muscle. I rose with the dawn and listened to the wind in the trees. I painted the sunsets. I was alive and golden, every single cell of me.

That fall semester I took a kayaking class on Cayuga Lake. The instructor was this semi-retired, semi-enlightened, grizzled old man who wore Hawaiian shirts and called everyone by the wrong names, as though he had just stopped bothering to learn them. I think his was Gary, but I can’t be sure. Three times a week in the cool mornings he watched me tear through the water, pivot sportily around the buoys, and finally drag my boat to shore, panting and grinning, before I ran to my Romantic Poetry class. I came every Sunday when the boathouse was open, too, where he signed me in and handed me a life jacket and told me to have at it. We regarded each other with an unspoken understanding. And one day when he caught me beaming, staring out across the lake, he said, “Janet,”—I had long since stopped correcting him—“you seem too happy to be a college student.” I knew what he meant. It was a different kind of happiness, the deep-rooted kind, the promise on the other end of a dark tunnel.

I have so much of it now that I’m almost suspicious of it. How long can euphoria sustain itself? But I guess somewhere near its core, there’s a single, thick ring of lonesomeness. For the longest time, my singledom didn’t bother me—I even inwardly applauded my ability to be alone without being lonely. Other people were settling, I told myself. Settling or co-dependent or incomplete or just filling the silence, scared to be alone with themselves. Now it’s different because I actually have something to offer. After all these years, I’m finally at home in this body, this skin. I walk with my shoulders back. I meet men’s gazes. I’m carrying all this love around and there’s no place to put it: it’s an electric current that, without an outlet, loops and loops on itself until the charge is unbearable. I don’t want much, don’t need forever, just a meeting of minds and a laying-on of hands; just to share the strange cicada-song dusk with someone, nested like parentheses. Just love that reaches, one long muscle.

So apparently I’m a little late to hear the news that Taylor Swift is in talks to play Joni Mitchell in the onscreen adaptation of Girls Like Us. 

I found out about it while listening to a three-week old episode of Julie Klausner’s hilarious How Was Your Week? podcast. Here was her take:

I feel like if Taylor Swift plays Joni Mitchell they’ll have to reshoot that scene in ‘The Kids Are All Right’ where Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo bond over Joni Mitchell—and instead they’ll just throw up into each other’s mouths.

Okay, so, I don’t hate Taylor Swift. I think she writes good pop songs, and she seems about as sweet and down-to-earth as a millionaire with no visible pores and an ever-rotating cast of famous suitors can realistically be expected to be.

I’m actually not being condescending here. It isn’t easy to write good pop songs. You have to have an innate sense of what will make the masses’ collective hearts swell, drawing from tried-and-true formulas while still retaining your own fresh, distinctive voice. I certainly don’t underestimate the value of pop entertainment; it both informs and reflects the cultural dialogue, so clearly it has great worth. In other words, this is not a snobbiness thing. Whether you prefer a minimalist Philip Glass sonata or a great Tom Petty hook, the point is that both those works have the power to get your blood moving. 

Even if her material is overproduced and glossy, Taylor Swift is a good pop songwriter. Joni Mitchell, on the other hand, is a fucking legendary one. And in this case “pop songwriter” means the following things: 1) was signed to a major label pre-internet/-Long Tail/-file-sharing; 2) on popular radio; 3) wrote bestselling albums that had a huge cultural impact; and 4) wrote some seriously infectious songs. 

I am (I hope) preaching to the choir here when I say that she’s just in a league of her own, but have you ever listened to her albums from the late sixties and early seventies, before her voice was ravaged by a pack-a-day American Spirits habit and age? She had some serious pipes. Her voice could dive and flit like a bird to wherever she wanted it to on the scale, and it sounded like unrestrained, boundless joy. She didn’t need to do any of the showoff melisma that you hear from singers today (or during the end credits of a 90’s animated Disney movie). Plus, she could do the other side of the coin, too: whenever she goes dark and simple, it’s terrifically moving. 

There were plenty of celebrated female singers in her heyday, but Joni could play,and her style was totally fresh. Basically untrained, she went on instinct and messed around with tunings in new and inventive ways. Not only does that make the timbre of her music different from most things you’ll hear, but many of her chords are ambiguous from a music theory standpoint, creating an ill-defined sonic space in which the listener  can bounce around in a number of different ways. It’s so complex and fascinating and subtle. 

And we haven’t even talked about her songwriting yet! GUYS. Joni Mitchell could write a damn song. She once said that she always felt she was really a painter “derailed by circumstance,” and I think that that visual acuity did wonders for her lyrics, because no one can set a scene or show you an image as viscerally as she can. She was able to adopt a whole range of personas. She told stories about men and women and drugs and suicide and sex and the human freaking condition.

Taylor Swift writes about boys. And the way they make her feel.

I’m not saying that’s inherently a bad thing; I mean, I write songs about boys, and those boys have ever been on the cover of Ok! magazine, and I still feel like I can justify my existence on most days. Plus, thank God, from what I’ve heard of her most recent album it seems like she has dropped most of the juvenile fairy tale/Prince Charming crap. But she has a long way to go, and I think it is safe to say that 22-year-old Joni Mitchell blows 22-year-old Taylor Swift out of the water. 

Now, I am not a filmmaker, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be to cast a musical biopic and find the right balance between acting chops and music chops in your lead. But if you’re going go the route of casting a musician and putting the emphasis on that, why would you cast someone who has no discernible similarities to the person (legend!) she’s playing other than her hair color? Taylor Swift plays cowboy chords on a shiny custom guitar. (And it’s a Taylor guitar! Get it?? Haaaaaa.) Her processed studio voice sounds pleasant enough, but she still doesn’t have anything close to Joni’s emotional range or vocal dexterity, not to mention the fact that she’s always really shaky live. 

I don’t want to beat a dead horse, or a live one, really, but if the only substantial acting Taylor Swift has done is in that animated Lorax movie, then … why?? What makes her a good choice? I would much rather see a good actor with just serviceable musical talents, a la Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, than an inexperienced actor with a musical style/ability that’s basically irrelevant for the role. Even a good actor voiced by a Joni Mitchell sound-a-like for the music scenes would make a hell of a lot more sense. 

Please, Taytay, don’t do it. You are cute even though you seem to think you invented that whole making-a-heart-with-your-hands thing, but you’re smart enough to know that Joni Mitchell’s music runs laps around yours. And most people’s, so don’t feel too bad.