FREEHAND BOOKS LAUNCHES ITS FIRST FOUR TITLES SEP 17 WITH READINGS BY
MARINA ENDICOTT, JEANETTE LYNES, SALEEMA NAWAZ AND SUSAN OLDING.
7:30PM. CLINTON’S TAVERN, 693 BLOOR. 416-535-9541.
The biographical poem collection is something of an emergent genre in Canada and Jeanette Lynes uses the tools of that genre to trace the haunted life of Dusty Springfield, taking on the singer’s voice and jumping perspective from biographer to subject. An analogue to Springfield’s music, Lynes’ words end up a tussle between lushly orchestrated sentiment and the croak of hard living. It’s a fitting dynamic for a performer who spent her 60 years fighting with booze, the closet, and running head-on at the glass control booth walls that surround women in the music industry.
Lynes starts with a stumble in Springfield’s British childhood, which, as a biographical place, may be too cut off and abstract to the author. To be fair, Springfield herself walked away from there by reinventing “Mary O’Brien” as the “queen of blue-eyed soul.” Lynes’ strength comes through later on in her impressionistic and forceful evocations of music and artifice. “A record is a palimpsest,” she writes. “An incest / of sound. / A drillbit riding a carousel / at midnight. / The world’s most whopping layer cake. Not even the piggiest / piglets among you can ever eat your way to the bottom.”
Lynes’ agile lines also build thick characterization while we’re not looking. In “Some Facts About America” she inventively nails Springfield’s naïve vision of US culture and her struggle with authenticity: “President: Burt Bacharach/ Capital: Motown/ Language: Twanglish/ National Anthem: ‘Heat Wave’/ Official drink: soda.” Like Springfield herself, the facts are both true and false. Compare that to the singer’s move to the States in “Laurel Canyon, 1975” and the lament, “Fondue forks float amid a molder / of hibiscus petals./ Fuck fondue. All the scared little saucers. / She’s sung no songs for three years. What’s she got? / Gorilla biscuits, sweet interludes, Quaaludes, the girlies in their / tennis whites.”
Despite a flurry of details and a timeline that attenuates as it goes on, fleshed-out images, such as Springfield’s ever-more sculpted hair, run through the poems. Actually, there is a lot about the hair, either as a signifier of success (“all of London/ could be stashed in that hair”) or as a psychological barometer. Lynes describes Springfield’s one-year stay in Toronto — a dark-fucking period if ever there was one — with the chilling line, “The hairdressers don’t get her.”
The difficult job of a poetic biography is that it can’t be about a life the way a conventional biography is. A poetic biography has to also embody a life and It’s Hard Being Queen succeeds wonderfully as something both regal and gloriously wrecked.