wehadwildflowerfever

[wehadwildflowerfever]

I cannot believe people are endlessly reblogging this again, lol.

I was looking for Sufjan’s set time tonight for Sasquatch but this is what I found instead. So if you were wondering what he wore when he played in ‘06…

How patriotic.

[wehadwildflowerfever]

folklore - seven - favourite lyrics

[wehadwildflowerfever]

RIP Laura Lee, you would've loved that there were twelve disciples yellowjackets eating the body of Christ Jackie

[wehadwildflowerfever]

Woolf having a cat named Sappho is my new favorite thing.

[wehadwildflowerfever]

Various Storms & Saints appreciation post.

[wehadwildflowerfever]

The Spiraling Tour, Caroline Polachek, May 16, 2023

[wehadwildflowerfever]

- Maggie Smith, You Can Make This Place Beautiful

[wehadwildflowerfever]

datura innoxia

[wehadwildflowerfever]

“I’m trying to show you my hands, even when my hands are burning.” - Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

[wehadwildflowerfever]

It took me too long to make this connection.

[wehadwildflowerfever]

So it’s both “Mermaids” release day and the day I can finally unwrap my “Daffodil” tattoo.

I’m staying up until midnight to hear this last Dance Fever song, so I’ve spent a large part of today thinking about the whole album.

I’ve worked through a lot of it academically this year, but I haven’t really let myself sit down and think about what it means to me personally. I saw someone write that the build up of “Mermaids” feels like a scream waiting to be released (@veronicaofosea), and that’s so close to how Dance Fever as a whole feels to me. Listening to it has felt like letting out multiple screams that have been building up in my body since girlhood.

Florence isn’t close to the first artist to remind women that we don’t have to be good, seek approval, be desirable, and keep the peace. Within my own pantheon of favorite artists/musicians/poets, I have heard it so often. Mary Oliver has told us (“You do not have to be good / you do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting”). Tori Amos has told us again and again in more ways than I have room to write down (“She’s been everybody else’s girl/ Maybe one day she’ll be her own”). Each instance has felt like a small revelation to me. An idea I could intellectually know to be true, but couldn’t feel in my body when needing to go out into the world to assert myself. My voice is always quieter than I mean it to be. I apologize for myself when I don’t want to. I have a really hard time making eye contact. Dance Fever marked the first time that I could fully hear this truth. Right now. In my late thirties.

I don’t know what did it, exactly. I think part of it was lockdown and being on my own so much. Probably having the space to retreat into myself, being responsible only to myself and my partner. Having very few external expectations placed on us. And then coming out of that, Dance Fever was the first piece of art to shatter my grief-induced numbness.

“Oh bring your salt, bring your cigarette. Draw me a circle and I’ll protect…” The ferocity of the circle drawn in “Heaven is Here.” The dark magic and intentional monstrosity of it. How it made a protected space for our rage and mourning and reclamation of self.

The tender, funny anger of “Girls Against God.” (Which actually made me feel conflicted at first. Growing up going to an Orthodox Hebrew school, we didn’t write God’s name on anything that wasn’t sacred and meant to last, even in English. Writing down that title was literally the first time I spelled out “God” which was scary but also powerful.) The permission of being able to own our anger, even if it’s just us, in our pajamas, alone in our bedrooms.

And it took me a while to notice what was being sung during the “Dream Girl Evil” bridge, but once I figured out that it was a reversal of Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What does it mean to look at our world on the verge of collapse and respond-- at least for a moment-- by essentially saying well fine, this wasn’t a world built for us. If it’s dependent on women being the world’s angels and dream girls, just let it all burn. “I am nobody’s moral center / it cannot hold.” Again, this intense permission to claim our rage and independence.

The part of the album that has probably made me cry the most is a lyric I still don’t fully understand. It’s toward the end of “Choreomania,” when the music slows down a little and Florence sings, “And do they speak to you? Because they speak to me, too. The pressure and the panic you push your body through.” I’m not sure who “they” are for her, but there is something so comforting in how the fourth wall breaks down here, how she sings “they speak to me, too.” The vulnerable confession that we all carry unwanted voices with us born of mental illness, or intergenerational trauma, or gendered social expectation, and the recognition of what those voices do to us and our bodies. The anxiety and the panic attacks.

This album feels like a release of those voices or an attempt to live with them in a way that allows us to fully reclaim ourselves.

Even just posting this feels like something I wouldn’t have done before. I would have checked with multiple people to make sure it wasn’t too much, or too pointless, or too intense, but I think of “Restraint” and post it anyway. “And have I learned restraint? Am I quiet enough for you yet?” Saying “yes, but I’m unlearning it” feels like a source of power.

[wehadwildflowerfever]

From The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck.

[wehadwildflowerfever]

Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

[wehadwildflowerfever]

I can’t sleep, so I’m listening to random things on YouTube, and this was a comment on “Tonya Harding.” I laughed so hard.

[wehadwildflowerfever]

Here are “some admonitions & advice” on poetry from the enormous course reader Lucie Brock-Broido made for her students. I love the course packets that writers put together for the classes they teach. They are always peculiar & idiosyncratic & full of love. There should be an archive of course packets for us all to browse.

[wehadwildflowerfever]

Sylvia Plath, from Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices

[wehadwildflowerfever]

“How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.”

- Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder