🐚 Notes on "Jersey Shore Sound"

Dear friends,

As promised, today I’ll be sharing a look into one of my poems!

I fell out of love with poetry for a while, and “jersey shore sound” was the piece that brought me back. Its appearance in Dear Damsels was my first publication in years, as well as the first piece of writing I shared with my family in years. It means a lot to me.

I recently revisited the writing of this poem for Listen to the Muse, a course about finding writing inspiration in music that I ran for Sword & Kettle Press. Here’s what I learned, plus a few exercises for writing your own pieces.

Because I am who I am, we’re going to start off by talking about the Gaslight Anthem. A punk band from my home state of New Jersey, Gaslight is well-known for wearing their musical influences on their denim jacket sleeves. They’ve been my favorite band since I was in high school, and I learned a lot about Motown, soul, and classic rock by paying attention to the music they referenced and covered.

For an example, we’ll back it up a little to another Jersey legend: Bruce Springsteen. Here’s a little bit of of his 1984 hit “I’m on Fire”:

Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby
Edgy and dull, and cut a six inch valley
Through the middle of my skull

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the middle of my head
Only you can cool my desire
Oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire

And here’s the bridge of the Gaslight Anthem’s song “High Lonesome,” off The '59 Sound, the album of theirs with the most references:

There were “Southern Accents” on the radio as I drove home
“And at night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet”
It’s a pretty good song, baby, you know the rest
Baby, you know the rest

There are two little references in this bridge: a name-drop of the Tom Petty song “Southern Accents,” and then that direct quote from “I'm On Fire.” I love how this bit gives you the feeling of listening to different songs come on the radio, and uses “I'm On Fire” as a kind of flirty point of connection between the narrator and the person they're speaking to.

Listening to so much Gaslight Anthem for so many years has clearly had an affect on my writing; when I couldn’t think of a way to end my poem “jersey shore sound,” I stole it right from Bruce.

This is the chorus of Bruce Springsteen's “Atlantic City,” released in 1982:

Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies some day comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

I love this chorus, especially those first two lines; there’s something about this phrasing that sounds so spiritual and mystical to me. (It also has a kind of cold practicality; this is definitely the guy who told someone, “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright.”)

In the context of the song, the “everything” that dies and comes back could be love or luck. (I’ve been turning over a much more literal interpretation in the form of a Jersey shore zombie story in my head for a while now.) But in the context of my poem, the “everything” becomes the narrator’s heart.

jersey shore sound

bad diner coffee—burnt bitter at the bottom
& no amount of sugar can cover it up. my heart curdled
when he left—sour lumpy buttermilk leaking
out of my chest, spilling onto the checkerboard floor.
i dream of red tides & always wake too early.
i never dream of him.

i knead my heart into different shapes & hope
that one of them holds. my heart as a metronome. my heart
as a horseshoe crab. my heart as a revenant.
i will drink this coffee until it wakes my
rotting bones. i want to burn my soles
on the summer sand, let the sun freckle my face.
i want to be my own ocean.

& you know how the song goes:
maybe everything that dies—

I pulled this quote from Bruce, and this technique from Gaslight. I wanted to use just enough of the song so that readers who know it can fill in the end with “someday comes back.”

(And, I didn’t know this as I was writing it, but ending the poem in the middle of the line funnily echoes one more New Jersey legend: the (in)famous series finale of The Sopranos, which abruptly cuts to black in the middle of a song too.)

Creative Exercises

Think about your own body of work: your poems, your stories, your personal essays, your half-finished pieces, your notes app drafts.

What songs or artists are your pieces in conversation with? How do you directly or indirectly reference them? Are there any places where you might want to make those connections more or less explicit?

What songs are important to your characters? Do they use music to connect with each other; if so, how?

Do you have any little bits of songs that you've always wanted to incorporate into a piece or writing? Write them all down somewhere, to refer back to when you need something to give a piece a little extra oomph.

Thanks for joining me today! I’m taking the rest of November off from writing this newsletter, because NaNoWriMo is starting and I have 50,000 words of fun queer fantasy romance to write. I’ll see you in December to let you know how it went!