On Grief and the Lyrics of 70s Soft Rock

You, sleeper, who is awake, why not listen
For above you are clouds of solitary voices
—John Yau, “Egyptian Sonnets”

From Freud’s analysis of grief and melancholia, it is possible to see how the experience of unrequited or unavailable love could lead to a writing in which the poetic speaker through positioning himself as the lover enhances his capacity to write poetry. In the case in which object loss is responded to in ways similar to those of mourning, the poet’s love writing could initially sustain or even intensify feelings of love, but eventually those feelings would lessen as the poet comes to transfer energies devoted to his beloved back to himself, or changes object libido back into ego libido.
—Jeanne Heuving  “Being in Love and Writing Love,” The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics,

For many months after my husband Dale died I was in a fixed state of grieving amongst these “clouds of solitary voices.” I felt like I was sleepwalking through time, wishing that we had one last, final conversation. It was a kind of object loss, in the most clinical of terms. He left me both in physical form and also with so many unanswered questions and no decisions in mutual consultation. He also had his own set of secrets, which I realized afterwards.

The mourning and grieving took on many complications for me. I was in a state of shock and doubt about the quality of our love and of our marriage. I’ve written about Dale’s quick death here before and how we did not have a chance to make decisions or process our lives together. While I knew his cancer was a rare one, I felt that he had isolated me from the doctor’s timeline and the outcomes of his cancer, specifically the cancer’s possible rapidity in spreading, its peculiar aggressive complications, and the savageness with which it creates secondary tumors that result in the patient’s death. Dale ultimately died from a brain tumor, which forced him into hospice where he would die in a week’s time. Because I didn’t understand his death was so imminent, even though there were clear signs, I had to process a thick denial I had been with for many months and the unmitigated shock that forms its hold after death. I spent many days thinking through our final months and days, looking for clues and hoping to find a letter or note from him expressing his feelings about his illness and our marriage. I didn’t. This put me in a stupor, a sad state of reflection to manage and explore. I was left with only my own poems, to write an honest book of prose and lyric poems about this time.

If I were religious or had some substantive sense of the supernatural, perhaps it might have made things easier for me. What happened instead, which is quite common among the widowed, was I became acutely sensitive to signs, signals, and patterns. While I wrote raw poems addressing Dale—an epistolary—I began paying close attention to a set of specified signs of lyric speech that were not in poems; rather, they could be found outside of poems, and not anything refined, but rather the sonant and soothing 1970s (some early 80s) narrative songwriting from the lone stereo speakers Dale left me.

I also became nostalgic for a previous self before meeting Dale. I craved an activity that would both pacify and stimulate me into finding subjective closure. I wondered why the 70s songwriting narrativity was so alluring, and I wanted to think about it as a kind of “love writing”—a 70s lite narrative rarely developed in contemporary songwriting (or not with the same timbre or content). A kind of lyric-lite that was sustaining then, and a similar journey to what Jeanne Heuving refers to in her chapter (quoted above), songs that journey through object loss with excessive exposition and storytelling.

It was the over-explaining in these songs I found so alluring—listen to some of them; they go into excruciatingly neurotic detail about an event (think about The Piña Colada Song). During those months I must have been hard to bear because so much of the experience I required felt conditional—my friends were forced to unpack what they thought of as base lyrics: stories from a sort of lost generation that became Muzak—songs from the grocery store that no longer held their previous grace. For me they did. They were the deepest of the deep. Because at that time I couldn’t listen to popular music, intellectual avant-garde, ambient, progressive or indie—all music Dale and I listened to—as it felt triggering—and so I settled on music from a time where love was a theme I had not yet experienced but only imagined in its glory and possibility, and those crooners gave me something wholeheartedly true and earnest, including every cliché I could hold between my ears. This to me was a form of lyric address, specifically, in my mind, from the dead to the living. As much as I hate to say it, but when Dan Hill’s clichés (“Sometimes When We Touch” ) become a searing reality, what are you left with?

 “I want to hold you till I die/Till we both break down and cry/I want to hold you till the fear in me subsides.” These silly lines struck me down with their raw declarative statements. Their absolution applied to death and provided me with a sense of devotion that would have been too crafted in the elegiac poem. I began to think so literally: one of you did hold the other till they died, and one of you will not be held anymore till the fear subsides. These song lyrics became utterances unearthing my deep regrets and laments. These songs start to earn their gravity for me even though they were effusively melodramatic—their lyricism was in their crying out. I couldn’t have this in my poems but I could follow it in a narrative like this one. How could I imagine its glory in the poetic form?

I began then to think about lyric intensity and narrativity in helpful ways. These solitary voices absorbed me with their storytelling, and I started to make connections between this aesthetic experience and the poems I write. I’ve often given my students a hard time about the uses of sentimentality in the poem: what’s cliché, what’s overwrought, and what are obvious metaphors, particularly for the love poem and then the love poem in the elegy. It leads us down a path to discuss two forms for the poem: the lyric and the narrative poem, which can be the same poem, too. The elegy, which can be sometimes in the lyric form, is defined by the properties of lamentation and solemnity.

The living write to the dead with an eulogy as a memorial and an elegy as its permanent poem. I could not stop thinking that so many of the 70s songs I was absorbing had this powerful elegiac quality to them. What could I do about the pop song’s sense of time and lyric address? I started to believe in my heart—not in any delusional way—that Dale and the dead in general were speaking to the living through these sorts of songs. They held me captive to the possibility of another kind of lyric address, a recurrence from the past to the present. The scholar Jonathan Culler asks: “What does the lyric address accomplish? First it gives us an event in the lyric present, the moment of address, when one longs for or praises the beloved or complains about his or her unresponsiveness. This permits a more vivid expression of feeling…” I, too, with an idea of the song lyric, could hold a present tense in my head for as long as I needed to bring the dead back to speak to me.

***

The first time I heard the late Marty Balin’s “Hearts” I was in a Girl’s Club in Hudson, Massachusetts where my godmother took me to make friends my age. I spent the weekends with her—three towns over from us— because she was my mother’s best friend and my parents worked on weekends. Kasey Kasem’s excited speech during his countdown on Sunday mornings affected me—I loved the ranking of these songs, particularly the dedications. I loved his presentations and his descriptions of the songs. When “Hearts” came on that first time, it silenced me with its sincerity and what I might now call playfully as the ceasuras in that song—a deep pause interrupts that song. “Is Everything Alright?” The song is an apostrophe to unrequited love, a lover moving on.

Because I hadn’t heard that song for many, many years and it came on the radio as I was leaving a memorial gravestone Dale’s mother had placed next to his dad, it moved me. It was Dale’s birthday and it was two years after his death that his sister and I visited this grave with his (now late) mother, Donna. In that moment that I heard it, I felt Dale’s blessing. I wanted to believe that he might enter into my day and simply ask that question. It provided me solace. It felt like Dale speaking through Marty Balin. An apostrophe from the dead, this is my theme, I speak to the dead and they speak back through 70s song lyrics; and as I have already said, I’m not a supernaturalist, rather I believe it’s a way to process how I choose to talk to the dead, to sort out our problems and the time that passes, our heartbreak and our heart love. I was a lover moving forward.

When I’ve started my poetry readings these recent years, I ask audience members if they like the song “Sentimental Lady” by the late Bob Welch (so many of these singers are now not with us!). Its opening lyrics are “You are here and warm but I could look away and you’d be gone.” That lyric was all I needed for months. As cheesy as they are, these lyrics helped me conceive my poems for my new book Grief Sequence.

Pandora’s 70s lite station helped develop sentimental theories, a sense of narrative, and a new lyric address that soothed me and helped me build a sequence that felt attuned to the particulars of a complicated spiritual grief process. Particular songs with their narrative insistence were speaking back to me, especially certain songwriters like David Gates from Bread. (“Goodbye Girl” )

David Gates, also gone, was Dale speaking from the dead. Not really, but I felt grounded in the depth of this voice—it was teaching me about a different kind of transitory sense of speech; the notion of the song speaking back—again, an inverse of the apostrophe form—was an inviting idea; plus, the exposition of the narrative song from the 70s to the early 80s was also intriguing. Other songs to be savored: The soundtrack to the film Xanadu allowed me to fully immerse in the concept of a muse and ELO’s “The Fall” insists on a fragment form, utterance, and negation. The “fall” also takes on a kind of heroic action that happens both in death and dreaming. (This song helped me create a section in my book titled Dreaming Without Knowing.)

And I also found that I unconsciously coupled it with Joan Armatrading “Down to Zero”—these notions of falling are abundant. I loved the richness in these songs.

Why wasn’t poetry doing this for me and why was it this particular lyricism that helped so much? Was it a kind of vulnerability of exposition—so many awkward utterances and confessions were mixed with the right melodies? Was I also immersing in a more innocent time in my life—a prepubescent sense of love and courtship? The wisdom of a time I had not yet experienced but could learn about through a necessary distance (wasn’t this what the lyric poem wanted for me when I became an adult)?

Immersing in the sentimentality of that decade helped me heal. Whether it’s Love Story, which I watched many times those early months and its bad sequel Oliver’s Story there was something deft and true about the expository and vulnerable life story of the 1970s narrative song that taught be about loss and intimacy in the 21st century. For these solitary spaces where I could listen I’m deeply grateful. I learned to love my grieving process, and mind you, these songs also helped me fall in love again, with the kindest man I could imagine, who makes such an earnest effort to communicate and talk through every nuanced outcome imaginable so I feel safe.

There’s so much I want to say about “badness” or writing through sentimentality, and I’ll keep writing this essay till it’s fully realized, but for now I’ll keep thinking about those lyrics and my real life now. Boy, did I ever intensify the love process through the songs that came on Pandora then. Yes. I’m proud to say they helped me write through grief. I found I loved my own clichés and found a new lyric address to the dead and the living both of whom I love, in the same poem.

Take to your bed
You say there's peace in sleep
But you'll dream of love instead
But oh when you fall
Oh when you fall
Fall at my door

—Joan Armatrading