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Popular Music
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Music. A meditation on messages, POPULAR MUSIC asks: how does art make itself heard? The poems of Kelly Schirmann's debut full-length collection offer a unique voice, investigating the spaces between-between the singer and the audience; the lyrics and the message. Like a pop song, these poems encourage and distract, inviting the reader and listener in, wanting to tell you things that seem intimate, while telling them to everyone. They want to know: is anyone listening? And reader, we hope you are.
142 pages, Paperback
Published May 15, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 9, 2017
I heard Schirmann read from this book last spring, but didn't get around to picking up a copy until AWP this year. I'm glad I did.
I loved Schirmann's prose pieces on what music does and means to the human condition. She name drops songs I don't love and made me think about them in a different light. Her poems were weighted in just the right ways. She isn't pretentious in her delivery and somehow has a grasp on analyzing things that seem unexplainable.
I highly recommend this book.
I loved Schirmann's prose pieces on what music does and means to the human condition. She name drops songs I don't love and made me think about them in a different light. Her poems were weighted in just the right ways. She isn't pretentious in her delivery and somehow has a grasp on analyzing things that seem unexplainable.
I highly recommend this book.
May 21, 2022
Please consider reading the full version of this review at my website and support independent internet
...[c]ollectively, we must uncouple such lines from the expectation of to-be-read. To free it from the mire of The Collection and let is soar into your soul. Do finish a book of poetry in less than a year. Don’t put it on goodreads. Let nothing so beautiful as poetry become a too-long car ride.
...[c]ollectively, we must uncouple such lines from the expectation of to-be-read. To free it from the mire of The Collection and let is soar into your soul. Do finish a book of poetry in less than a year. Don’t put it on goodreads. Let nothing so beautiful as poetry become a too-long car ride.
January 8, 2019
the kind of relatable & succinct prose that hollows one out so that one may be filled back up. has stuck with me. recommended.
December 28, 2022
"The great Dream of our age
is to love what you are paid for
The great Myth of our age
is that this happens how we want"
I knew nothing of this writer-poet or this book ahead of delving into it, and I'm so glad for that. Schirmann makes the mundane into the marvelous, with the tasks, habits, conversations, thoughts and experiences we have adding up to a beautiful sum.
This isn't really about "popular" music, though there are winking asides and passing lines, but rather about internalized and interpersonal matters of the human condition. I'd give it 3.5 stars on here if I could, with the caveat for me being that I sometimes wanted a section of verse or a paragraph/section to go deeper or further with its thought. That might not've been the point; perhaps her point is to take it there yourself, for yourself.
The author name-checks everyone from Joni Mitchell to Frank Ocean to Joanna Newsom in the "liner notes" at the back of the book, which I read in a bit more than an hour as it flipped between chapters of poetry and prose.
The poetry has a gripping, stream-of-conscious-thought quality to it. I appreciated that, despite its intent, it didn't feel forced it read to have tried too hard.
I appreciated that Schirmann, like fellow poet-essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, weighed in on Martin Scorcese's 1978 music film, The Last Waltz. Both writers remain obsessed with it, a visual recording of a concert, the last one by The Band ("Take a load off, Annie!") that also features Joni, Mavis, and more musical luminaries. So now, even if it's considered something of a Thanksgiving movie, I'll turn to that with fresh eyes.
"Music is where we store our knowledge. We bury it there, all kinds. When we play it back we remember what we needed to internalize—our most obvious truths, the ones we could never really hear.
"Does art tell us anything that we don't already know, or think we know; anything that doesn't remind us of something else, something we've already heard?"
is to love what you are paid for
The great Myth of our age
is that this happens how we want"
I knew nothing of this writer-poet or this book ahead of delving into it, and I'm so glad for that. Schirmann makes the mundane into the marvelous, with the tasks, habits, conversations, thoughts and experiences we have adding up to a beautiful sum.
This isn't really about "popular" music, though there are winking asides and passing lines, but rather about internalized and interpersonal matters of the human condition. I'd give it 3.5 stars on here if I could, with the caveat for me being that I sometimes wanted a section of verse or a paragraph/section to go deeper or further with its thought. That might not've been the point; perhaps her point is to take it there yourself, for yourself.
The author name-checks everyone from Joni Mitchell to Frank Ocean to Joanna Newsom in the "liner notes" at the back of the book, which I read in a bit more than an hour as it flipped between chapters of poetry and prose.
The poetry has a gripping, stream-of-conscious-thought quality to it. I appreciated that, despite its intent, it didn't feel forced it read to have tried too hard.
I appreciated that Schirmann, like fellow poet-essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, weighed in on Martin Scorcese's 1978 music film, The Last Waltz. Both writers remain obsessed with it, a visual recording of a concert, the last one by The Band ("Take a load off, Annie!") that also features Joni, Mavis, and more musical luminaries. So now, even if it's considered something of a Thanksgiving movie, I'll turn to that with fresh eyes.
"Music is where we store our knowledge. We bury it there, all kinds. When we play it back we remember what we needed to internalize—our most obvious truths, the ones we could never really hear.
"Does art tell us anything that we don't already know, or think we know; anything that doesn't remind us of something else, something we've already heard?"
November 9, 2017
goodness, not my favorite but why play favorites these days?
October 11, 2018
“I’d like to be purposeless
with a little specificity
The exact person I was born as
but older”
with a little specificity
The exact person I was born as
but older”
January 5, 2020
just here to say this might be my favorite collection of writing Ever?
June 7, 2022
i didn’t hear any music?
January 17, 2017
3.5 stars
The first half of the book I enjoyed, the second half did nothing for me. I just feel like it lost its focus and tried to do too much. I think I liked section III the best, and some of the poems in section II, which I can't mention by name because they are untitled.
The first half of the book I enjoyed, the second half did nothing for me. I just feel like it lost its focus and tried to do too much. I think I liked section III the best, and some of the poems in section II, which I can't mention by name because they are untitled.
April 21, 2019
The prose sections throughout are beautiful analyses of art's place in the modern world, but Schirmann's poetics leave much to be desired, opting for the same easily accessible, shallow structures as the popular music she is questioning.
October 25, 2016
Anyway
It's a beautiful song
I don't know what else
you want me to say
It's a beautiful song
I don't know what else
you want me to say
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews