Humans Being Made: A Playlist for the May 2019 Issue

For our May 2019 playlist, we asked contributor Bianca Stone, whose poems “Marcus Aurelius” and “Cutting Odette’s Fingernails” appear in the issue, to curate a selection of music for us. You can read about her approach to creating the playlist below. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

Poetry and music have a fraught, passionate relationship. I find it difficult to listen to music when writing, and even more difficult to hear poetry with music. Yet, I’m intrigued and invigorated when the right sounds come together with language spoken, not sung. Like pairing images with text, it is harder than it seems to do right. One can ruin the other, detract from each medium’s power. But done well, there is electricity, music enriching the words into something almost holy.

There is an elegiac quality in this May issue of Poetry which I tried to mirror with my choices. I see a trend of troubled sleep, a disquieting in wakefulness, a mourning for the natural world, for the future. I see a twining of women with the vigor and grief in nature. I see hauntedness and hope and love, loss and light. How to capture this with sound? Piano—from Bill Evans to Franz Liszt; the minimalist style of Arvo Pärt’s Gregorian chant music; one of the best soundtrack makers, Gordon Hempton, from whom I offer an hour of sounds of spring. There is the genius of one Sharon Van Etten (one of the only tracks here with lyrics), and a clear interest around the mother. There’s ethereal, experimental music that will get you in a strange and unfamiliar space, which is where poetry occurs, thrives, and repopulates the junk that accumulates in our minds. I hope this soundtrack is something you can listen to while reading this powerful May issue.