A Playlist for the November 2018 Issue

For our November 2018 playlist, we asked contributor Shane McCrae to curate a selection of music for us. You can read about his approach to creating the playlist below. Click here to open the playlist in your Spotify app.

At the end of the email in which she asked me if I wanted to put together a Spotify playlist for the November issue of Poetry, the indefatigable Holly Amos wrote, “it should be pretty quick.” That was two weeks ago. Holly couldn’t have known, when she asked if I wanted to make the playlist, that she was speaking to the vainest part of me, the great delusion that has shaped me as a social being: my belief that I have good taste in music. This process could not be quick.

And so it has come to pass that two worry-filled weeks after I accepted the task with the grim yet joyful stoicism of the employee who dons the giant Chuck E. Cheese head and meets their maddened, screaming makers next to the Skee-Ball machine they once saw a kid barf on, I have finished making the playlist. And you know what? Making it was joyful! Each poet got at least one track (Tom Sleigh got two because I felt like I was giving Denis Johnson a track along with him, and Martín Espada got a symphony in three tracks). I tried to match the poets to songs that gave me feelings similar to the feelings their poems gave me, but of course no match is perfect, and I reckon a few might seem utterly bizarre. Well, maybe one match was perfect: I gave myself an actually dolorous song written by John Dowland titled, essentially, “Always Dowland, always sad.” That is a precise measurement of how goth I am. Hopefully, Reader, you will find a track in this playlist that exactly corresponds to your level of goth.