A Playlist for the September 2018 Issue

For our September 2018 playlist, we asked contributor Keith S. Wilson to curate a selection of music for us. You can read about his approach to creating the playlist below. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

There’s something triumphant about a love song. Not all these songs are about love, but many of the ones that are were songs my dad blasted every weekend from his giant wood-panel speakers in our small place in the concrete plains of southern California—him belting out every word, my mom singing along during the chorus, me reading hundreds of books or playing absurdly difficult Nintendo games with my brother. I may not have recognized loss, or duty, or desire, or betrayal, but some part of me understood perseverance. 

This issue of Poetry is filled with vigilance and determination, and while I can’t know if Carolina Ebeid, Mia Kang, Donika Kelly, Alison C. Rollins, or sam sax (to name authors of some of my favorite poems) were thinking strictly of love when writing any of these poems, their work and the work throughout this issue often reminds me of the quality of troubled optimism of so many of my favorite songs.

It could be I believe everything is a love song. I’m reminded of how difficult it was when my family moved to Kentucky, when I was 13. Later, I’d stand at the open mic—every week at the Bean Haus Coffee Shop—and realize anew, each time, that if I wanted this to work, I had to try to admit I had feelings or words or words about feelings. And I’d read my poem. That is what every actually-felt love song feels like, and how I feel about the poems dearest to me as well—however glassy the face of the world can be, here is my persistence anyhow. Some sense of meaning. Maybe only one of us sees  it. Maybe not. But speak.