Poor Humans! A Playlist for the September 2019 Issue

For our September 2019 playlist, we asked contributor A.K. Blakemore, whose poem “father’s last escape” appears in the issue, to curate a selection of music for us. You can read about her approach to creating the playlist below. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

If I could have chosen a month for which to confect a Spotify playlist, I probably would have chosen September because it is a month of gloom-lite/liquescent sunshine, and also Virgo season (the A-type earth sign). In fact, I already had such a playlist, made several years ago. Revisiting it for the purposes of putting together this one, I was disappointed by how literally I’d interpreted my self-imposed brief: Big Star’s “September Gurls,” “Autumn Sweater” by Yo La Tengo.

Now that I’m 28 and work an office job and the texture of my life has assumed a supple regularity, I think I’m actually nostalgic for September’s devastating mythos: the back-to-schoolness, the dilating nights of summer, Tony Soprano in a golf jumper, mellow fruitfulness, etc. This elegiac patterning seems present in this issue of Poetry. There’s sensual overload, but even more of its hangover—the dark-yellow flesh of nectarines past their best. And of course, any Keatsian delight in the transition of the seasons is necessarily complicated by an awareness of our environmental precarity, appearing sometimes suddenly through the doleful blues like Tommy Pico’s whale dying in Thailand “after swallowing 80 plastic bags” in his sequence from “Feed.” Or as Henri Cole puts it, in “Haiku”:

Unnatural cycles seemed to be

establishing themselves, without regard to our lives.

Deep inside, I could feel a needle skip:

                 Autumn dark.

              Murmur of the saw.

                 Poor humans.

So I did what I felt was the best thing to do and picked 20 songs that made me feel the way these poems made me feel. I picked 20 songs, because that felt like a reasonable number. And then another track, by DJ Sammy. I hope you enjoy it.