Ariel Yelen's "What Is This Air Changing, This Warm Aura, These Threads of Air Vibrating Rows of People"

Thoughts on music and the collective.

Devin Kelly

Aug 7, 2022

What Is This Air Changing, This Warm Aura, These Threads of Air Vibrating Rows of People

This small effort
Because this little singing
This little sound
Small song
This fathomless effort
This voice which comes from the gut
This soft effort at making song
This effort at song
This effort to make song which birds do effortlessly
What birds do effortlessly
This tiny bird
This tender worthy effort
And sometimes it is no effort
No effort to sing
Sometimes I’ve had a drink or two
Sometimes it’s effortless to make song
If enough people sing in a group
If I’m part of that group, I cry
I am holding a thing that breathes and makes sound
Where song comes from and goes to

from Poetry (March 2022)

I ended last week’s newsletter with the following passage from Barry Lopez’s Horizon:

With his fingers on the cranium of an australopithecine skull not much larger than a grapefruit, on the forward part of the vault where one day frontal lobes would rise up in Homo, he says, “Barry, I can’t prove this, but I believe we sang before we spoke.”

When I first read this poem by Ariel Yelen — whose work I’ve been reading this week after coming across her poem “Revolution” — I felt it echoing inside me even after it ended. And it’s funny, because that poem “Revolution” ends with the following lines:

Music, under most circumstances
Will take desperate
Measures to come back into your life

Maybe I have been thinking about music ever since thinking about that passage from Barry Lopez above, which stunned me when I first read it. Sometimes the world conspires to make poetry out of the truth of our existence. Earnest, factual poetry — that we sang before we spoke. Or that a blue whale, the largest animal on earth, cannot swallow anything larger than a grapefruit. When awareness of something such as this occurs, I am reminded that I need to hold onto my wonder for the rest of my life. That I need to cultivate it, to give myself permission to have no words to say.

But the truth is that I think I’m always thinking about music. I’ve been relearning the guitar ever since the pandemic started, trying to play it the same way I play the piano — layering soft chords over a simple melody, over and over again. I bought a loop pedal, and most of these summer days in the late morning, before I plan some curriculum or leave my apartment, I experiment with looping a single note at quarter time, and then finger-picking something over it, and then trying to sing. Yesterday I did this — in some shoddy, amateur way — with Warren Zevon’s “Mutineer” in my head, softly singing “Ain’t no room on board for the insincere” as I tried to stay in time with the rhythm I created. It might not have been good — god bless the people in the apartment next door — but at least it was music.

Today’s poem is not just about music; it is music. It has the effect of a song I listen to sometimes at night, “Illusion of Time,” by Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini.

Though there are no words to this song (I promise I don’t only listen to ambient instrumental music, even though my most played songs are on an instrumental playlist that I add songs to with abundant glee), there is this ongoing repetition. A phrase, turned and turned again, sometimes distorted, sometimes made louder, sometimes a gentle melody faded to the background as other voices rise to song’s foreground. I feel that same repetitive turning in today’s poem. It is there in the words this and small and effort — these words that return over and over again, each its own sound and meaning, but each changed, slightly, by the words around.

I think what I love too about this poem is its choice of words. I think of that word effort. It is a word that means something like work, something like labor. And yet, it’s softer. It tries to come to a point at its end, to land on the harshness of that final letter, t, but it doesn’t really get there. It stays soft. It’s something you can say while you hardly move your lips. It’s something you can say effortlessly, through barely any work at all.

And so I love that word, and how it repeats itself again and again in nearly every line. Like a looped melody, that one phrase garners its own developing language as it meets the new language of each line. I think sometimes that people confuse repetition with sameness, but really repetition is the opposite of sameness. Or, at least, sameness is not the goal of repetition. It can’t be. When something is repeated — a word, a phrase, an image — it has the same effect as looking up into the sky on a night filled with stars. As you hold your gaze, more stars appear. They brighten your periphery. They twinkle where there once was empty space. That gaze — strange as this might seem to say — is itself an act of repetition. To hold that gaze is to make a choice, every second, to continue holding that gaze. Your stillness in that moment is the result of a repetition of choice. And your repetition allows for more light to come into the field of your vision. Isn’t that beautiful? Even in stillness, we are repeating ourselves. And even in repetition, we are changing and being changed.

And so, when Yelen repeats effort over and over again, it has the effect of softening the literal meaning of that word — one that I associate with work — and emphasizing the actual softness of the word’s pronunciation. Say the word effort a hundred times to yourself, and you will dull whatever harshness is apparent in that word until all you are doing is gently pushing the eff of the word through the small space between your teeth and your bottom lip. Do this again with the word this, and you’ll find yourself breathing out from the roof of your mouth. Breathing out, all s’s, like the wind through a crack in the window.

When this effect is created, this repetitive momentum, it allows — just like the stars in the image described above — for every inserted image to feel heightened. And so it is with this poem:

This effort to make song which birds do effortlessly
What birds do effortlessly
This tiny bird
This tender worthy effort

Here, birds are inserted, almost gently, as if they flew in through the crack in the window of this poem’s voice. And later, this happens:

Sometimes I’ve had a drink or two
Sometimes it’s effortless to make song
If enough people sing in a group
If I’m part of that group, I cry

It takes almost the entirety of the poem for the “I” to appear. I love this. I love this because it is a poem about not just song, but collective experience — the way music shared among others is one of the most soul-enriching moments any single living and breathing person can be a part of. When I encounter this “I,” after lines and lines of gentle, soft repetition — lines of singing, I might say — I feel like I share a little bit in it. I feel like I am seeing and being seen, like I know not just the crowd, but someone in it. And for that, I’m grateful.

It’s hard to read this poem and not thinking about shared experience. I often tell people that the most intimate thing you can do with someone is invite them to a concert. Not like a sit-in-your-seat-concert, but a stand-on-the-floor-by-the-stage concert. The pandemic has hampered my ability to experience such a thing lately. But what I mean is that, when you’re standing by a stage with someone, your reactions to the music being played are wholly your own. They are so wildly individualized. Some people thrust their limbs. Others stand still. Some nod. Some move their arms above their heads. But all of that is allowed. All of that is beautiful. And it’s beautiful because it is happening within a shared moment, where the song is the same but the reactions are different. It takes trust to appreciate that, to let yourself react the way you feel you need to. I think music makes it easier for such trust to occur, but the trust has to be there, still. The trust allows for the intimacy of the individuals sharing the collective.

It’s that trust that allows for someone to say:

I am holding a thing that breathes and makes sound

And it’s that trust that allows everyone to hold some part of the music — which is the same music.

Such a thing makes me think of a couple things. The first is that, in my opinion, one of the saddest videos on the internet is this video of the late Elliot Smith singing “Waltz #2.” He makes it through a chunk of the song and then, right before the video ends, stops playing. He says he can’t play it anymore. He’s sick of it.

It’s so sad, especially given the context of his death, because it feels so lonely. It feels so remarkably lonely. His eyes. The almost sheepish shame at stopping. You want to tell him that it’s okay, that you understand, even though I’m not sure if any of us do. There’s a loss there, a loneliness so palpable it makes it difficult to watch. A singer divorced from the song. The word effort, only harsher, the way I forgot to mention earlier that effort’s second syllable rhymes with hurt.

And then there are the beautiful, can’t-believe-it’s-true clips of Joni Mitchell and Brandi Carlile circulating these days on the internet after Brandi offered her entire set at the Newport Folk Festival to Joni Mitchell, allowing her to return to a limelight she has been away from for so long. My girlfriend (actually, I can say fiancée now — pretty awesome, right?) and I have been watching these videos over and over again. I prefer the more amateur videos, the ones taken from the crowd itself, because they offer a sense that today’s poem offers. A sense of being among others, rather than separate from them.

It takes me about thirty seconds into the above video — the moment when Joni joins Brandi in song — before I start to absolutely pour tears. Like today’s poem illustrates, there is effort in this moment. There has to be. It must have been so difficult for Joni to return to the stage, to relearn so much about her voice and her body. But, as the song progresses, that effort seems to become, as Yelen writes, a “small effort,” a “soft effort.” It’s there about 80 seconds into the song, when Brandi stops singing, letting Joni finish the final lines of the first chorus. And then it’s just Joni’s voice alone, singing a song she’s probably sung thousands of times. But she’s with people. You see them. They look at her with love and awe and wonder. And when Joni finishes that line — “I’d still be on my feet” — and her voice finds its raspy, gorgeous footing, she smiles. She smiles so big and wide that it breaks my heart and puts it back together. And, from the angle of the camera, I feel part of the crowd listening and singing and, I’m sure, crying. And so I cry. I cry the entire time.

The line that stands out to me the most from today’s poem is the following:

This tender worthy effort

I don’t know who gets to decide what is worthy of anything, but certainly anything that is tender offers its own worth to the world, and it is a worth that is valuable. I think that we live in a moment that renders each person perilously close to the kind of loneliness that is the absence of tenderness. A moment not just subject to polarization and disinformation, but subject, too, to the kinds of communication that are the opposite of whatever the models of gentleness are. I think we live in a moment, sadly, where people might disagree that tenderness is of any worth. Where tenderness is hard to find, because it doesn’t live on the surface. Because it lives beneath the surface, in the ordinary kindness of others. So much we don’t see. What to do then? What song to sing? I don’t know. But I don’t want to forget what it is like to feel part of a group singing the same song, and what it is like to cry in the midst of others, to let myself go, and to be held up at the same time.

Some other things:

I’ve deactivated my twitter account, potentially forever, and so I’ll probably start posting some things at the bottom of these little essays that I’d normally reserve for twitter. As in:

My book, In This Quiet Church of Night I Say Amen, published almost 5 years ago, is now out of print. Such is the life of indie poetry publishing. Part of me feels sad. Part of me feels a little lost. Part of me feels at peace. And all of me knows that I have a big stack of copies, probably about 20 or so. If you’d like me to mail you one, just send me an email, and we can figure it out. I’ll sign it, tell you where the typos are, and send you a little doodle on a postcard.
I’ve been fine-tuning my sourdough bread over the summer. I make about four loaves a week, and I’ve been giving a few away to friends and the occasional online person. If a couple of you would like one (preferably if you live in NYC), I’ll hand deliver it to you for free. I’d also be down to mail it, as well. Just email me, and we can also figure it out. Here are a couple photos of some recent loaves. Good stuff, right? I’ve been trying to get that crumb airy and perfect. I promise this isn’t some scam. I really love making bread. And food is meant to be shared.