A Surfeit of Feeling: A Playlist for the November 2019 Issue

For our November 2019 playlist, we asked contributor Christine Gosnay, whose poem “Sex” appears 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.

When I was invited to create the playlist for the November issue of Poetry, I knew I would have to give up something I love. I could not add Rachmaninoff’s entire oeuvre to this playlist, so I added none of it; I compromised with a single one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, performed by Glenn Gould near the end of his life. He plays more deliberately, more achingly in this recording than he famously did some 30 years earlier. This piece ends a playlist that is meant to be a soundscape to accompany the astonishing scope of feeling in this month’s magazine. The playlist also reflects the musical obsessions that have followed me around during my life; more than a few love songs snuck in. 

There are poems of great sadness, longing, anger, justice, and contemplation in this issue. I chose to add to the playlist what I believe is the saddest song ever written, Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around to Die,” even though I can barely stand to listen to it. I selected Kaki King’s “Night After Sidewalk,” The Field’s “Arpeggiated Love,” and Nils Frahm’s “Four Hands”—three instrumental compositions that burst with hope and ambiguity. But there are also big, wide, loud songs here—songs that say what they mean in no uncertain terms—by Prince, the Moody Blues, Erykah Badu, Jimi Hendrix, Tom Petty, Peter Gabriel, and Robert Plant. Many of these are songs that, despite their in-your-face melodies and lyrics, have been reading and writing companions to me for years. They’re songs to listen to again and again as they rise in the mind from the level of abstract beauty to conscious understanding, just as the poems and commentary in the issue call out to be read and turned over in thought many times.