Talking the Poem Road | A Conversation with Courtney Marie Andrews
Interviews
By Abraham Smith
Courtney Marie Andrews is a legend made and in the making.
Old Flowers, her latest record, out last year, was nominated for a Grammy and landed her International Artist of the Year at the UK AMA’s. Old Monarch, her first poetry collection, published last month in the US, splashed across the ponds the week before last. In song and poem, this old soul stirs and ferries the water deep down under the well; fosters and forges a tender-fierce fulcrum between hope and loss, interdependence and solitude, place and drifting, magic and fate, the timed and the timeless.
The best of poetry and song travels with a stained map only and by feel. By book and by lungs, Andrews meanders far into the road’s bend, into oxbow territory where no water island is lighthouse free. Born to wing indelible ink, epic sound clear to the knowing there’s no way to. Resonant spark. Transformer sizzles. Candle flame bowing like a heron hunting her own shadow. Poem and song planting, pulling at the same time. Reach for ground and the ground reaches away for you. Home sun home rocklawn. Milkmoon milkweed. Cactus shipmast mystic tomb seed.
Truth: the pliant foundry in CMA’s singing mesmerizes. How tall that hill? You can only know it by how it changes your breathing. How deep that surface? Well, my spine’s a cyclone of silkroad monarchs now. Halts and metamorphoses. The hearer the statue the licked stamp nosed to the equator. And after, well, there never was a before. Now am I an extra in a play Ovid wrote in island exile on a scorched stone? There’s freezing heat to it. And a soaring something like a radio static kite dipping in kestrel swoops arising like the candymouth kid on the swing—for higher unbending, shout-em saplings up sudden from the knees.
There’s a whole moodworld frank within her vowels. A secret sea continented by leviathan whose blood is lava, whose breachments are preachments pertaining to saffron saguaro lavender pendant laughter elbow windmill. A blue so wide and healing you get to feeling like you are falling through quilted velvet hurricanes with a tulip tree covered in silver shoes for a parachute.
Before Honest Life, her half a decade back breakthrough, Andrews had been kicking the lanterns down the roads for a very long moon, many an album. Departed her desert home in her midteens to busk around the world. You name there and she played there—at cafes, on corners, underground in the NYC subway like Woody before her. The early albums shimmer: Andrews sings along rapt through the tune. But when it comes to Honest Life, she’s no longer singing along. Her voice no longer accompanies. No now it’s the singular instrument, skying out through acre, weather, aria: a NASA windchime apotheosized: unstitches the chrysalis to become the entire theater, every dust dot in every curve of the curtains and the ushers’ flashlights lolling and the out-of-breath old timer ascending toward the exit and the popcorn and the wine and popcorn oil under the sink and the bartender cursing under her breath, it’s this new wool turtleneck, it’s this tag unscissored feels like the devil’s very briar tongue out walkin the fenceline of the spine and who is that texting, phone jumping on the ragshined bartop a little, while the old timer takes a Thursday to thumb out a 2dollar bill.
CMA followed up Honest Life with 2018’s May Your Kindness Remain: a palette of salves and walking stick anthems many of us keenly leaned on while limping rickety through unGreat America. There’s a deeper register en masse here. It’s a raucous raw kiss of a record in the manner of Iris Dement’s The Way I Should; only the joists feel more like wound-dresser prayers than kick-the-stall cusses.
Then the great wide hunker, then the mask torn off the heart: Old Flowers. New to it? Here’s my elfin advice: hop on your George Jones lawnmower and go 1003mph right straight there. I don’t think you can arrive at a more moving break-up record made in North America since the ’70’s. These songster poem-tunes arboresce around the sage truth that mourning is nonlinear; gathers all around; roots through: aching absence catching at the taproots of myriad sorrows: everything tinged piebald by the leavings: takes a scorching to wake some seeds: and you’ll find an elegiac meditation upon passed away mentor-friends; and you’ll find ex-haunted waking dreams; and you’ll find that ochres of sunset and sunrise elide when tenderfooting out again toward maybe new love.
CMA’s wordplay helps me to a name for poetry and songwriting: a barbershop candycane whirl of creation history and trickster tale: the poet the old soul with the one eye made of experience and the one eye made of innocence with a throat leased from a bobolink. Oh, and was that just a little earthquake, why yes it was, and yes it did kindly tip the spicerack rite on ya. Wonder and wisdom twinned in an opening face. Singer reshaped by song, song by singer, and it all reweaves, reveals the mask of her new old new old way. Bring the bird down as binocs the better to see the bay. Guardrails like steel tusks catching up out of the fog. And who knows, coyote-spider, what’s going to happen and happen.
Forever the lifeforce of artforce is paradox: the transfusion news that oppositions are family. And Andrews is as deft as she is dexterous with it in song and poem and sun and tides and titles: a seeing double seated and standing about time. See, no flower ever grows too old. No butterfly ever either. Ah, but what about the forever nature of stout and stalwart evanescence and what about what keeps happening one time only and then again sings the dew-jeweled spider slantwise upon the dewclaw of the coyote beltin AM oceanfront property at the cough-button-cue moon.
The sweet neighbor news of poem and song is this: the standing invitation to percolate in the mosaic of another’s mind. Yes there’s a deep porch in CMA’s word way. Both the gusts of look-who-is-here surprise and just the whole primordial, prescient, beautiful ordeal of reliving living and living and loving. Of going on. To find and lose and find. Yesterday’s keepsake, tomorrow’s worm spaceship. Tomorrow’s wonder, yesterday’s bargain rack rust. And it all shines like the road does, typewriter ribbon tracing the jawline of this earth, and some there are born to refract the mystery: some last dark in light caught, held, sung; some first light at dark dawn glimpsed, lifted, written along.
It was a canyonwide gift to visit with the luminous Courtney Marie Andrews through email and over Zoom: a legend made and in the making: here, hear:
Abraham Smith: “Old” is much in the naming air between Old Flowers and Old Monarch. I find myself drifting toward the phrase old soul. Do you self-define as one and do you think old souls are born that way or made that way? I am thinking in part of your hitting the road to busk across the land in your midteens. Seems like traveling rough young would age a pair of eyes and season the angles of perception. And could you describe, since you sidestepped the escalator through academe, an early and unlikely teacher from those first days on the road and on the Greyhound and everywhere in between?
Courtney Marie Andrews: Old feels like a comfortable purgatory—the sweet spot in between youth and impermanence. It implies a deep knowing. I’ve always loved the term “old soul,” but I couldn’t tell you why or who certainly is one. Generally, it pertains to folks who are like endlessly clean sponges of the world, soaking in the truths of light and dark without becoming jaded or broken. To me, an old soul is someone who is both teacher and student. Whether or not old souls are born or bred is an endlessly philosophical question, and something I’d be okay with being mysterious.
When I was sixteen, I didn’t go to college. I hit the road. The road also happens to be in a big, bright, and confusingly layered world, so in my youth I became accustomed to learning by way of experience. I was the type of kid who wanted to hop a train, Greyhound, or put my thumb out, all in the name of a good story. Stories are also great teachers. When things went wrong, it only fueled my need for adventure. You get stuck on the side of the road enough, and you learn a lot more about the ways of the world than you would in the comfort of your living room—at least that’s the path that worked for me. Because I’m drawn to the unconventional, risks always meant at the very least, a great story, even if it meant great failure. The story fuels the art, and the art fuels the story. I was born into a long line of roofers. Roofers take risks. They stand on high stakes every day, but it doesn’t stop them from climbing the ladder. Maybe I have a little bit of that in me—the need to climb to the top to see what’s going on.
AS: How much time stretches between the oldest and newest poems in Old Monarch? I sense some very new ones in the mix—especially given the news that you were in the Northeast to finish the collection and there are a few Nantucketed poems peppered in. Which bends toward my revision question. Mary Ruefle suggests to revise toward strangeness. Do you have a central sense of what you are aiming for when you lean into revision mode?
CMA: These poems were written over the span of two years, with the last ones being written in Nantucket at a writing retreat I attended last summer. The Northeast is where I finished writing and revising this collection, which is perfect, being that the book started in the Sonoran and finished in the Northeast: a trajectory very similar to the actual collection. Born in the desert, journeying towards a garden.
Revising towards strangeness is definitely how I approach my process for poetry. When a poem presents itself in my mind, it’s clear as the alpine sky. My job is to then leave the reader room for excavating the mystery. I can’t hand them the answers. Great poems make you do a little digging, even if with simple language. If the reader feels involved, they’ll more likely feel connected.
AS: You’ve described Mary Oliver as your bible when it comes to poetry. I had the chance to be on an arts fellowship for a year in Provincetown back in ’04–’05. Sometimes, very early in the morning, out on the sand walking, I’d come across sole marks from someone somehow earlier than me. And I’d wonder if that was maybe Mary out moving with her dogs. She says in her craft book, and I am paraphrasing, you’d better hope I don’t show up to your party, because it means that I am writing. An old pal was pals with her and he was chuckling once while we were having a wine: he called her and she answered and he said, Hey Mary and she said Mary’s not here. This kind of hide&seek is something I’ve heard a lot about her from friends of friends. In your world, when so many folks are trying to get your attention, and when there are somewhat new, in the history of art anyway, pressures on the artist to be her own social media promoter, how do you carve out the sacred times to create? And how did you learn to say an inner Hurrah when saying an artistically necessary no to a world hoping you’ll say yes to everything?
CMA: That is a lovely story, and one I deeply resonate with. I’ve coined a term called “chunk writer.” For my own sanity, I allot around two to three months out of the year, where I turn my phone off and retreat somewhere inspiring. I dedicate these “chunks” entirely to the muse. Walking is key. Nature is key. Self-reflection and solitude is key. Turning off and turning in is integral. Saying “no” has been a learning process for me. As a young, poor punk, “yes” was practically tattooed on my forehead. Taking every opportunity became second nature, because who knows when the next one would come? Now that I’m older, I have found that the most important thing you can make time for is creating and loved ones. The other stuff is a bonus, and even a ripple effect of focusing on what matters.
AS: I think of you and Charlie Parr as co-poet-laureates of Planet Troubadour. Y’all share a lot and one thing is walking. Thoreau preaches the key joys of sauntering: aimless walking. And I love that baked into the etymology of troubadour is the news that the troubadour walks out to find the song almost more than the troubadour makes the song. The song’s already there: we need only happen upon it, through it, to it. I’ve read that you thrive imaginatively via walks in places new to you. Has your Covidian hunker meant that you are re-taking the same walks again and again and again? If so, how have you managed to make those same-thing-again saunters feel new? Which is I guess a way of asking, mind sharing a miraculous-common thing you’ve happened upon during your saunters lately?
CMA: Aimless walking is my greatest tool. Something about moving your legs makes your mind move, too. When I was writing Old Monarch, I’d often walk for hours every morning. By the end of each saunter, I’d almost always have a thought worth seeing through. There was so much free time in the pandemic—an endless clock of solitude and space. I’ve always been an avid walker, but in 2020 I doubled down on the activity. There’s a park near my house in Nashville, and sometimes simply watching the planes fly overhead brought me peace—a small semblance of a still-operating world. It seemed surreal. These are the small observations we make as writers—the little needle you pull through the cloth.
AS: I saw you play a show a few years back at Kilby Court in SLC. It was a small crowd. I leaned toward a pal and said, “This is someone who sells out everywhere she goes in Europe and here she is singing for ten or twenty of us.” The show was mesmeric. You sang as though you were singing for 1,000—and we all left buoyed by crane-wings of gratitude. Which stretches over to my poetry question in this way: Who is your ideal audience, your ideal reader even, for your poetry? And while I am sure it varies poem to poem, I am wondering if, broadly speaking, you turn to poetry, making it and taking it in, to feel settled or unsettled: shook and shaken or centered and cleared?
CMA: My ideal reader is a truth seeker—someone willing to learn about themselves and their surroundings. Someone willing to think critically and deeply. Though, that’s only my ideal and I can’t pass judgments too quickly on how someone takes in my work. Poems can be for anyone at any time, though it’d be a great shame if one didn’t take them in with an openness to ponder something new.
I turn to poetry as a student and a teacher. When I was very briefly considering college, I thought I’d go to school for philosophy. Instead, the road became my teacher, and writing became my translator for those experiences.
AS: Yeats said, let your poems snap shut like a box. Old Monarch shows you to be a master of this snap-like turquoise rhinestone feeling at the exit. How conscious are you of these resolute resolves at the ends? I guess I am asking if endings feel intuitive mainly or if sometimes you start with a close and work your way there?
CMA: Closure is control. Everyone loves to arrive at the top and enjoy the view—get the whole picture. In a world so uncertain and mysterious, it’s relieving to arrive somewhere. It’s nice to offer someone a cold drink after the climb. First and foremost, I am a storyteller, so endings and punch lines come naturally to me. I’ve had to train my skill set in the way of letting certain poems hang without conclusion.
AS: I was so moved by your portrait poems: of your mom and of your grandpa and of the need to speak justice toward your passed grandmother. One thing that your poems and songs—old and new—convey is an ongoing meditation upon the nature of fate. In music, you sing, “fate is such a joke”; in poetry, you identify as “a festering ancestral wound: a freckle on the elbow of the world.” Where’s the balancing point for you these days between our locked-in DNA fate and our self-shaped human destiny?
CMA: I believe the dynamic between our ancestral trauma and fate is a dance. The two inform each other, especially if you’re paying attention. If you’re not careful, you can begin to place blame on one for stepping on your toes as a coping mechanism. Blame is easy though. I think it’s important to have a healthy amount of skepticism and humor regarding both, because none of us truly have all the answers, and both are always on the dance floor.
AS: The poems of Old Monarch are not shaky wishes; instead they proffer the ballast of soul-easing wisdoms. As such, there is, again and again, an aspirational quality to the poetry regarding living well. Do these wisdoms geyser up from the terrain of the unfolding poem, or is it more that you have the wisdom kicking around in your notebook or mind—and the wisdom therefore urges you to make a poem to house it?
CMA: Often in my wisdom poems, I’m trying to soothe myself—give myself the advice I’d like some wise old woman to tell me when I’m feeling lost. During these writings I accidentally become the voice I need to hear, the soothsayer and truth dealer. That’s the great treasure of writing on paper—the voice doesn’t have to belong to my mouth. These words were craned out of thin air, so they can be anyone’s for the taking.
AS: Old Monarch offers a cornucopia of potent figurative images: seismic metaphor and simile energies. Tu Fu said an image is like being alive twice, and I felt alive 2222 times while reading your collection. Do you come to these figurative magics as naturally as breathing, or is it something you’ve trained yourself to weld in the way we learn to horseride or bikeride?
CMA: Deep self-reflection and questioning are at the helm, which in a way, are their own version of training. Poems have come to me since I was a child, but it took years to hone and understand great writing. I am still learning. The work is never done.
AS: You prophet that “desire and longing are the only shoes you need to climb mountains.” I think of what Robert Hass said about the ode: if we had what we want, we wouldn’t have to sing to it. And you sign off, at the end of Old Monarch, by bringing back longing. How do you unpack this fathomless word, and could you describe why, for you, desire and longing are the only soles and muscles we need to rise?
CMA: Without longing we wouldn’t have highways, legendary love stories, clothes, the great pyramids, peanut butter toast! Longing is the catalyst for all that we have—the fuel that drives us into great adventures, change, and undertakings. Longing is what got me on a Greyhound bus to New York City at eighteen. I longed for adventure. I longed to get my heart broken again and again just to get a little closer to the truth. Longing is a great tool, often misunderstood for something cerebral and sappy, but it is a feeling more powerful than what it’s accredited.
Abraham Smith is the author of numerous poetry collections—most recently, the chapbook Bear Lite Inn (New Michigan Press, 2020), the full-length Destruction of Man (Third Man Books, 2018), and the forthcoming Dear Weirdo (Propeller Books, 2021). Away from his desk, he improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin’ Yarns; their debut record, Break Your Heart, was released on Dial Back Sound in fall 2020: thesnarlinyarnsut.bandcamp.com. He lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is an associate professor of English and co-director of creative writing at Weber State.
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