ok —-parte de la entrevista con Jack White donde habla sobre poemas y dream journals!
He’s a kind of historian of American vernacular, drawn to the relationship between pop and the avant garde, between maverick auteurs and the communal imagination. His own work proves that defiant eccentricity is no obstacle to stadium shows and Bond themes, and that being wildly prolific hasn’t diminished his mystique. With this book, he turns his curatorial eye on himself.
So what made you think of it now?
I wanted to test the waters about doing a full book of my poetry and writings. I was a little bit worried about that being taken the wrong way. It’s tough when you say the word poetry out loud. People can immediately think there’s a pretension to it.When did you start writing poems?
As a teenager. I started going to coffee houses in Hamtramck, a city in Detroit – the real European-style coffee houses, not the modern-day ones. It’s a bit irritating now to see 15 people on laptops, nobody speaking to each other. I almost want to open up a coffee house where that’s not allowed and you have to talk to other people. I was writing, performing folk music sometimes, learning about art from all kinds of artists. It was a pivotal moment for me. The coffee house needs to come back and be a sacred place where people can commune and don’t exploit it for social media content either.
Seeing all your writing together, I can identify some recurring themes: birds and trees, broken bones and lonely ghosts, God and Detroit …
It’s like you can look at a painting and say: “Oh, that’s a Van Gogh.” Or you can hear a song and say: “Oh, that sounds like Trent Reznor.” As creative people we have these little comfort zones in our minds: this kind of melody, this way of ending a sentence. And that becomes your style. It makes you wonder about the words you find comfortable.
So do you make any distinction between lyrics and poetry?
It’s all poetry to me. I think all music is the blues and I think all lyrics are poetry. When I hear a song, it bugs me when I can’t hear what they’re saying.
You used to keep a dream journal. What are your dreams like?
My dreams are quite hilarious and off-kilter. I so rarely hear people say: “Oh that’s what my dreams are like.” They always say: “That sounds like when I dropped acid.” So maybe my brain is tapping into those synapses.
