Self-Portrait With Cardinal Wing & Mesabi Cherry (Adrienne Novy on Crowd Surfing With God)
Adrienne Novy's book Crowd Surfing With God drops from Half Mystic Press on August 21st. Adrienne is a teaching artist, Bettering American Poetry nominee, and musician currently living in Saint Paul, MN. Her work can be found in FreezeRay Poetry, Harpoon Review, Button Poetry, Maudlin House, NAILED Magazine, and Issue V of Half Mystic Journal. She is from the Chicago suburbs and wants to start a band with you.
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Today, my therapist told me she is proud of me
You came so far & you still made it here, she says
& suddenly I am thinking of a migration of birds exhaling into feathers,
the dreams of people I have hurt forgiving me & opening into a tender field
I spent nine months with a cherry pit resting between my teeth
& chipped my left incisor in Minnesota
I was so sick I had feared every cardinal’s ghost swimming through
glass & awoke pulling out my own hair, longing for a nest of windows
I do not blame the Midwest for making me want to hold a funeral for the
sidewalk frogs, every hollow-boned corpse the highway, suburbia swallowing its ache into a humid yawn
I broke, but I did not become the breaking
If recovery is singing into a new morning, I want to lean into its wings
I am learning to trust myself, despite—
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I worked on Crowd Surfing With God as a project for at least a solid year, but most intensely in the spring and summer of 2017. I was in a really bad mental health place, and had made the decision to take the year off from college to stay at home and get help for my anxiety and depression. Writing and editing poems with friends, cutting pieces and reworking them, and just the sheer process of getting the book to be in the order it needed to be. It gave me a purpose and an artistic drive after feeling burnt out from the structure of academia as well a way to feel like I was still a part of a community of artists even though I felt miserable and distant having to leave one I was just starting to get roots settled in.
I think if anything this book has taught me is the ways we as artists are capable of growth, both creatively and in our everyday personhood.
I really noticed how I had grown and the ways I was healing through the process of this book. Many of these poems reflected on who I was when I was in elementary school and in high school, from the health problems I went to the music I listened to or loved to play. I even used skills that I had learned in therapy in my poems and how my writing had changed based on all the books and music I listened to during my recovery.
In this book writing process, I got really into the concept of ekphrastic writing. I think it came from both the special topics course I took with Sun Yung Shin my junior year of college, but also the book Oh God Get Out Get Out by Bill Moran. I remember opening Bill’s book to a poem I really liked (the poem was on death metal music, a genre I never listen to) and handing it to Sun Yung saying, “You’ve been telling us to get weird with writing with our writing this semester, and I think I finally get it now.”
I know that ekphrastic writing is often associated with visual art, but I think it most certainly applies to music too. Perceiving music in a visual sense seemed fascinating to me: there’s more than just the chord progressions and lyrics, and looking at the way I view art in its many forms makes my love for Kandinsky in high school make a lot of sense.
We can play a song and have a memory and emotion attached to it, and that that kind of experience can be so intense we may not be able to even listen to those certain songs anymore. We imagine what the musician may have been experiencing or feeling given the key or lyrical content of the song. Of anything, however, music is also a physical and collectible thing. We hold value and nostalgia in old cds, records, and concert tickets. Album art, too, is a physical thing, and art always beckons us with its unique story. How does album art encompass a collection of music the same way it does with a book? What images to songs hold and how can I play with them, make references that die-hard listeners and the songwriters themselves can catch and newcomers can still appreciate? How does a lyric become the bone of a poem? Or a prompt? If a song brings me somewhere, I want to be able to pull that place out of my head and sometimes share it with others. If a musician is from where I’m from, I want to take my readers home with me too. I want that world it’s dragged me to to come to life outside of me. I want to know what it feels like to hold it.
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