“Even at her plainest, she is opaque.”
“In this most present of moments, she was already living in the past tense.”
“It’s a multiple choice test with every answer scanned ‘C.’”
“The result is something like a dog that, when its leash is tugged, simply lies on the ground and shuts its eyes: basking in the sun, feeding off its warmth, never giving an inch.”
These are not lines from Lana Del Rey’s new book of poems Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass (Simon & Schuster), out on Tuesday, but snips from past New York Times reviews of the singer-songwriter’s work. Let’s call it the Lana-effect. The tendency for fans, critics, and writers (this one included) to deploy a string of campy descriptives in their attempt to do her justice. You could say everything Lana touches turns to poetry. You could say it’s high time she released a volume of it.
Though Lana Del Rey disciples have appealed to non-believers that her lyrics are poetry. And though Del Rey scatters Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath references into her songs (a track from Honeymoon plays like a gauzy, haunting recitation of T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton), this is indeed the first time she has classified her own work as poetry.
The book, which features ripe citrus fruits in Hockney-esque colors on the cover, contains over 30 poems. If in her songs, Del Rey coos with a nostalgia for a bygone era she has not actually experienced, in Violet, the longing manifests via typewritten pages of her poetry, which are digitally scanned before being printed in the book. The rare typos are corrected in pen; some lines are askew, suggesting a crooked page placement; and one poem has what appears to be a coffee stain. Her poem titles are achingly romantic, you'd half-expect one of them to be tattooed in slanted script on her forearm: “Never to Heaven,” “The Land of 1,000 Fires,” “LA Who Am I to Love You?”, “Tessa DiPietro,” “Paradise Is Very Fragile,” “Bare Feet on Linoleum.” They contain in them love/hate letters to her current Los Angeles, and peace offerings to her past life in New York. (According to contemporary poets, Violet smacks of Allen Ginsberg.)
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September 26, 2020 at 03:10AM
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Lana Del Rey Gives Us a First Look at Her New Book of Poetry, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass - Vogue
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