Yahoo Lifestyle Taylor Swift (For)Evermore: 113 Poets Pay Tribute #3
Taylor Swift forevermore! It’s the year of Taylor Swift (obviously) and more than one hundred poets pay tribute in a new book. Taylor Swift has published her own book–a keepsake from the Eras Tour–and been the focus of countless other books, from quickie biographies to silly sticker books to serious appraisals of her fashion and her music and her popular impact.
Since Taylor Swift’s new album is called The Tortured Poets Department, perhaps the most appropriate book is Invisible Strings. It’s a gathering of 113 acclaimed poets (like, Pulitzer Prize winning! National Book Award winning!) all contributing original pieces that celebrate the artist in Swiftian fashion.
Taylor Swift (For)Evermore: 113 Poets Pay Tribute #3: Friends Forever
Courtesy of Ballantine Books
Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Music of Taylor Swift edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty ($26; Ballantine Books; out December 3) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org
Here’s how it happened. Writer Kristie Frederick Daugherty had an idea: give poets their own, personal, “secret” Taylor Swift song to be inspired by and help spark ideas. Gather the contributions together. Share them with the world.
The response was overwhelming: artist after artist said yes, including Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Critics Circle Award winners, best-selling poets and the 23rd US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (the first Native American to be honored with that role).
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We’re offering one new poem a week for the next three weeks from this collection, an exclusive first look. You’ll find a poem inspired by Swift, followed by the poet’s thoughts on Swift, how the poem came to be, whatever they want. What the poet won’t tell us is which Swift poem they were assigned as their personal touchstone for the project. Your guess is as good as mine! We’ll feature four poems in all, concluding with editor Daugherty’s touching and penetrating thoughts on her journey with this project. Today? Finishing each other’s sentences, because that’s what friends do.
Taylor Swift (For)Evermore #3: Friends Forever
Taylor Swift (For)Evermore #4: (out Dec. 3)
Excerpted from INVISIBLE STRINGS by Kristie Frederick Daugherty. “Friendship” by Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder, copyright © 2024 by Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
“Friendship”
By Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder
The leaves said you were born.
Then the leaves said I was
born. Then my glittering suit
in the closet was complete.
Then your glittering suit was
complete. My suit walked into
the moonlight and sang numbers
to the glassy hills. Or sang to
numbers in glassy hills. Bodiless,
it could run faster without you.
But then it could only run toward
you. Each number had an echo or
three hundred thousand. The echo
said, I know everything or it hurts to be
a lone silver flame. On most nights,
I stand behind the bleachers,
break up with the moon and blame
it on the red bird. On my worst
nights, I blame it on you. It’s difficult
to hear the silence that comes before
you leave again. Because you stole
the bird’s song. The way your leaving
flickers like a celebrating light.
When you leave, I wonder,
What is the use of a song? Maybe
a song is the grief of your leaving.
The way a tupelo tree stands in
water with its sheen of friendship
and terza rima—the canopy,
trunk, and everything drowned.
Have you ever seen a tree die
right in front of you? I have.
It took a century. Almost as long as
it feels to watch a single green
leaf change to giddy red,
then a yellow that resounds
into the silence it made for itself,
like a clock. The best part of
friendship is how it’s always
silent, like walking a path next
to the cold river for a thousand
years, keeping the great secret.
On Friendship from Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder
MATTHEW: Why did you want to collaborate on a poem?
VICTORIA: One of my favorite parts of Miss Americana was when we got
a window into Taylor Swift’s songwriting process. I loved watching her work with producer Joel Little on “ME!” and watching them riffing off of each other while working on the song. Collaboration seems so important to Swift’s musical journey, and I also love artistic collaborations with composers, artists, and other writers, so I thought it would be fun to honor Swift’s collaborative process by writing our poem together. How about you?
MATTHEW: I was sure I would be less interesting on my own than writing with you. When I sent that first line, what did you think?
VICTORIA: I thought your first line, “The leaves said you were born,” was so weird and interesting. It was capacious enough to give me some ideas on how to move forward. It was a generous line. I was also interested in the “you.” Your line also gave me permission to be strange. What were you thinking about when I sent you a line back (“Then the suit in the closet / was complete”).
MATTHEW: I was thinking, this is great. I would never have written that line in a million years. And now I have to deal with it! I just kind of took it literally and started imagining one of those cool suits that country stars wear, called Nudie Suits, after Nudie Cohn, the guy who made them for Elvis, Gram Parsons, Hank Williams, and others. Her erstwhile country origins put her in the geography of those suits. Then you kept going!
VICTORIA: I love that— I had no idea! After that, we kept on going back and forth until we had a draft. And then I felt like we were done. But I loved when you kept pushing us to revise the poem more and to make it stronger. How did you or do you know when a poem isn’t finished yet?
MATTHEW: I just felt like the poem hadn’t found its subject yet. It looked like a poem and did stuff a poem does, but it felt . . . negligible. I knew we could do better. Plus I was still having fun! Were you annoyed at me when I said I thought it wasn’t done? It was a little hard to push back!
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VICTORIA: Honestly, I was being lazy and felt it was good enough. We didn’t have a title yet either. But in retrospect, you not feeling like it was finished yet pushed me more. And that’s what I love about collaboration. It was at that point, we also talked about how Taylor Swift’s lyrics were about friendship and that’s what I was writing toward. Were you writing toward that too?
MATTHEW: I was thinking about it the whole time, because that’s what the song is about, one friend leaving another behind. I guess collaborating is the opposite of that! Anyway I think we might have been texting about that idea, and I said no we’re not done and added some lines, but it wasn’t right yet. Then you thought of the title and took it from a bunch of lines into something that had a center of gravity (friendship) while still keeping it very loose. And adding the conversation and repeating, echoing voice in the beginning, which is absolutely key to the poem. To me that is the magic moment of a poem, when it finds that space of “aboutness,” in its subject but equally in its form and rhythm and song, that keeps the poem together, without being overly controlling. Just as the best friendships, too, give meaning to life without dominating it.
Original Draft
The leaves said you were born.
Then the suit in the closet
was complete. It walked
glittering into the moonlight and sang
numbers to the glassy hills.
Bodiless, it could run faster
and each number had an echo.
The echo said, I know.
It’s difficult to hear
the silence that comes before
you leave. The way your leaving
flickers like a celebrating light
every time my deferred self
waits here, in a giddy
despair wondering, what
is the use of songs? Maybe a song is
the grief of your leaving.
The way a Tupelo tree stands
in water with its sheen of
knowledge and terza rima,
the canopy, trunk, and everything
drowned. Have you ever seen
a tree die right in front of you?
I have. It took a century.
Almost as long as it feels
to watch a single green
leaf change to giddy red
then a yellow that resounds
into the silence it made
for itself, like a clock.
Excerpted from INVISIBLE STRINGS by Kristie Frederick Daugherty. “Friendship” by Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder, copyright © 2024 by Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Victoria Chang's latest book of poems, With My Back to the World was published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, including Come on All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Father’s Day; Why Poetry; and Story of a Poem, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. He was Guest Editor of Best American Poetry 2022, and from 2016 to 2017, he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the weekly Poetry Column for The New York Times Magazine. He lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Courtesy of Ballantine Books; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Scribner
Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Music of Taylor Swift edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty ($26; Ballantine Books; out December 3) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org
With My Back To The World: Poems by Victoria Chang ($26; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org
I Love Hearing Your Dreams by Matthew Zapruder ($26; Scribner) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org
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