Songs Are Like Tattoos by Elizabeth Majerus

Because so many poems in this collection carry titles and bits of lyric from the songs on Joni Mitchell’s Blue album, I donned my earbuds and listened to Mitchell perform them. Perhaps because my mind was so suffused with them, I found myself hearing the rhythms and lilt of Mitchell’s voice in the music of the poems by Majerus. I had been looking for some kind of dialogue between the songs and poems; I found a duet instead. And, indeed, in an email Majerus confirmed that the relation between Blue and her work was one of resonance, resulting in a book about the way that songs become indelibly imprinted with associations, traces of relationships, places, eras, versions of ourselves.

So mostly I forgot about Joni Mitchell and just read listening for the voice in these poems, which was itself musical (and sometimes with a twist on a Mitchell line), as in Majerus’ “A Case of You”:

But I can’t take a case
of you.    The best I can do is taste
a trace of you
          in these lines               from time to time.

While the singer in Mitchell’s lyric could “drink a case” of the lover and still be on her feet, the woman in the poem is speaking about endings, about knowing when enough is enough, about how much she is willing to handle.

That strong voice surfaces again in Majerus’ take on Mitchell’s character Carey in the poem of the same name: I need to be grabbed like a good old guitar and played hard, / not stroked like a fine thing lifted from a velvet box.

Lines like that reminded me less of Mitchell and more of Diane DiPrima’s demand in her poem, “The Party”:

I NEED TO BE LOOKED AT
       be seen
 & not twice a week
 I’m not a Brancusi bird.

Again, not a piece of art to be admired and put back in the box.

I need to be grabbed like a good old guitar and played hard, not stroked like a fine thing lifted from a velvet box.

In fact, what I found most compelling in this collection was that particular voice, its combination of fragility and ferocity, which comes through so strongly in “The Last Time I Saw Richard” that I simply have to quote a whole stanza here:

Excuse me now while I rack these balls and crack
them clean and wide. I’m listening, I still soak
it in when there’s a pocket of quiet. I’m an hour
late for home, but I’m alone and I’ve got to play
just one more game where I can hear the chalk squeak
and the bar talk, where every shot is mine.

The word music and the images ground us absolutely in the scene. We’ve all been there in that real pool hall and the metaphorical one, the sounds sharp and clear, cracking open the game, aware of the dangers and determined to be in charge.

At the end of the book Majerus gives us not footnotes but liner notes (remember, those bits of information and insight that appeared on the back of album covers in the days of vinyl LPs). The notes give us clues to all the bits of song and lore that stayed with Majerus like tattoos. Some day a graduate student will use them as the basis for her thesis, but meanwhile the rest of us can just enjoy these poems.

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Sibyl James is the author of fourteen books—poetry, fiction, and travel memoirs—including In China with Harpo and Karl (CALYX Books), The Adventures of Stout Mama (Papier-Mache Press), China Beats (Egress Studio Press), The Last Woro Woro to Treichville: A West African Memoir (StringTown Press), The Grand Piano Range (Black Heron Press), and most recently The Mother of Invention (a children’s book from CALYX) and Plum Blossom Wine (Empty Bowl Press). She has taught at colleges in the U.S., China, Mexico, and—as Fulbright professor—Tunisia and Cote d’Ivoire. As writer in residence, she has worked for the Washington State Arts Commission, the Seattle Arts Commission, Seattle Arts and Lectures, and the Seattle School District. Her writing has received awards from Artist Trust and the Seattle, King County, and Washington State arts commissions.