On My Mind with Gerry LaFemina

~ On Your Mind ~

The world, these days, asks to be on my mind. Between what’s going on in Ukraine and what’s going on in Gaza—not to mention the fact that the summer of ‘23 was the hottest one on record and the political heat emanating from a dysfunctional House of Representatives Republican majority—I can’t help but feel an intrusion of the outside world into my life and work. In this way, the fall of 2023 recalls 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic asked for my conscious attention.

That’s bad for a poet whose work depends on the mining of the unconscious. All my poems, as [Galway] Kinnell put it, begin with a spark of autobiography but leave the personal behind. I don’t like it when the news of the world calls for my monkey mind with its bag of delicious popcorn. I have no interest in writing poems about current events or current trends: plenty of poets do that. I’ve never been one of those.

When I was a teen-aged punk rocker, I played in a political punk band: Expletive Deleted. We played benefits against Racism, against nuclear proliferation, against police brutality, against what we saw as the rising tide of fascist leanings in right wing governments. Ha. If I only I could have seen the future then, I’d have seen what Trump would become and I might have gone a little easier on the Reagan administration in the lyrics of those songs.

Playing in a political band meant writing songs with an agenda and fulfilling that agenda. There’s no reason to revisit the lyrics here—they were bad for their time and they haven’t aged well. These songs were written with my conscious mind and my social conscience. And I sang them for years. Sang them to a whole bunch of people who raised their fists in the air and sometimes yelled along with the choruses. They dressed like me. They thought like me.  I was preaching to the choir.  At a certain point I fell in love with contemporary poetry and wanted to write differently or at least write about different topics. Goodbye politics.

As a subject matter. The fact is I find myself more political now in ways that matter, including a run for school board next year. All politics are local, as they say.

But writing a blatantly political poem isn’t for me. And now that I’ve found my way back to writing and performing rock n roll, writing blatantly political songs isn’t for me, either. Still though, the process of writing songs and writing poems is very different. There’s a purity and artifice to writing both. But each has its own purity and its own artifice. After 35 years of writing poetry, I’ve returned to the artifice and purity of the electric guitar and the three-and-a-half-minute song. I love the hook and the chorus. I love the simplicity of it all, which challenges my general aesthetic as a poet. I love the fact that as with all good choruses, people sing along when The Downstrokes perform them. 

Simplicity:  if I want to write lyrics about waking up with a hangover and have it be only about a hangover, that’s fine. If I want to write about growing up in New York clubs as an adolescent and how we were like stray animals on the prowl, it can be just a celebration of that. They tell stories, sure, and the songs get somewhere, but their concerns are my conscious thinking about the subject matter. I know what a song is about and its movement in and around the chorus is designed to advance a story, create tension, and resolve. Simple, unlike my poems, which often move from their triggering events in the way Richard Hugo discussed. A poem for me is a cascading field of linguistic, metaphoric, and often unconscious connections that lead me to some discoveries through the (lyric) attention of the process. Poems surprise and delight as I write them: I don’t know what formal concerns are going to be necessary, how the elements of craft are going to help shape and decide the poem’s endgame.  With my songs, their simplicity, their familiarity, their structural clarity delights.

I also love the challenge of seeing how literary I can be with a pop song, too. Can I get away with a song called “Poor Ahab” or name drop “Kerouac and the beats” in another?  There’s a long literary tradition of punk musicians—Jim Carroll and Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, Then there’s Allen Ginsberg on the Clash’s “Ghetto Defender.”

Of course, literary allusions work against the simplicity of the pop song. That’s the rub. As a poet and as a teacher and a musician, I’m always aware of my audience. Most poets I know listen to a lot of pop music, but many have a “song lyrics are a lesser artform” attitude. I’ve had it myself in the past. Yet we sing along. I know the lyrics to more songs than I do to poems I love. Keeping in mind that my audience in the Downstrokes includes poets and fiction writers, artists, doctors as well as people who didn’t go to college, I’m looking to work on multiple levels even as the songs themselves maintain their simplicity. It’s a tightrope very different than the tightrope I work with when writing poems. And although I’m not a formalist as a poet, every song requires me to think like a formal poet. It’s all rhyme and meter.

Returning to song writing has made me a better teacher, too. I’m a bit more open-minded toward my students whose only real experience with poetry—beyond some units in high school—are the songs they fell in love with, those lyrical expressions of the songwriter. Sure they’re not poems but there’s a lot of poetry that can be found there. 

About The Author:

Gerry LaFemina’s most recent collection of poems is 2023’s After the War for Independence.  Other recent books are The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness (creative nonfiction) and Baby Steps for Doomsday Prepping (prose poems). His previous books include a novel, a collection of short stories, and over a dozen poetry titles. A noted arts activist who has served on the Board of Directors of the AWP and edited numerous literary journals and anthologies, LaFemina founded the Center for Literary Arts at Frostburg State University, where he is a Professor of English, serves as a Mentor in the MFA Program at Carlow University, and is a current Fulbright Specialist in Writing, Literature, and American Culture. In his “off” time he is the principal song writer and front man for western Maryland original rockers, The Downstrokes, and is Board President of Savage Mountain Punk Arts.

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More info about Gerry on his website.

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Check out Gerry’s band The Downstrokes

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