Review of Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass by Lana Del Rey
Review by Michael Quinn
Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, a collection of poems by the popular singer Lana Del Rey, wears its Beat-poet influences proudly. It reads like an unedited love letter to and from California, a place of “1,000 fires” and “scorched earth.” The small, hardcover book features shrunken-down reproductions of Del Rey’s typewritten pages, mistakes and all. Some are water-stained—as if, when raising a sweating glass to parched lips, a few drops dotted the fresh ink of the hand-written corrections, smudging the blue ink.
Blue is a big part of Del Rey’s oeuvre, in color and in mood. It appears in the fragments of sky seen behind the orange tree on the book’s cover (an oil painting by Erika Lee Sears), and in the book’s photographs (taken by Del Rey), the cloudless sky augmenting the ugliness of industrial California (chain link fences, water towers, and power lines).
It’s also the color of the cheap-looking vinyl record Del Rey made to accompany this collection, recording a few of the poems with frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff noodling away in the background, sometimes overpowering her. After all, poetry is its own kind of music. The two feels at odds with each another, like a duet between a violin and a tuba.
The music’s so loud, you can hardly hear what Del Rey’s saying. The book gives you the chance to see for yourself, and maybe think, “I wish she was singing.”
The moment I first heard Del Rey’s single “Video Games” (on a mix friends sent for Christmas in 2011), I had a physical reaction. Something crept over me that made me sit up straighter. I put my ear next to the speaker behind me and flooded myself with that voice: it carries heartache and a melancholic sadness, stained by booziness and a blur of tears.
Del Rey’s songs are often told from the perspective of a beautiful, passionate young woman obsessively in love with some no-good man. The character we think of as “Lana Del Rey” reminds me of the kinds of women I knew when I was young, gorgeous girls in messy apartments who hung their bras from doorknobs, and went to bed with makeup caked around their eyes, and dirty feet. They rarely slept alone.
No matter what Del Rey’s singing, her voice can sell it. In Violet, the words have to do the heavy lifting. They’re not quite up to the task.
The poems are dense, repetitive. Most address an absent lover. They awkwardly try to convey a free-to-be-me bohemian spirit, an outlook, as relayed in the opening title poem, inspired by watching a little girl play in a backyard at a 4th of July barbeque. From that point on, Del Rey writes, “I decided to do nothing about everything / forever.”
Unfortunately, many of the poems reflect this hands-off approach, conveying only boredom, and a kind of privileged idleness: “to the lake or to the sea / My only question” she writes in one of several underdeveloped haikus.
With poems, it’s always a mistake to assume the author is the speaker, yet Del Rey seems to write solely from an autobiographical perspective. “I haven’t been drunk for 14 years,” she writes in “My bedroom is a sacred place now—There are children at the foot of my bed.”
Many of her songs—“You Can Be the Boss,” “Driving in Cars with Boys,” “This is What Makes Us Girls,” “Get Drunk,” to name just a few—touch on this problematic past. But Del Rey never fully excavates it in her songs. It just surfaces as background, for mood and maybe context.
She could mine these experiences differently in her poems, but she doesn’t. She might not know how yet.
I wish she’d gone undercover and taken a poetry class, the way she takes flying and sailing lessons in the prose-poem “SportCruiser.” A birthday gift to herself, the lessons are also a way to distract from thoughts of a neglectful lover: “it can’t always be about waiting for u.”
The pilot warns her she doesn’t trust herself, and she feels found out. The captain teaches her to sense which way the wind is coming from, to stand in a supermarket parking lot, close her eyes, and really feel it. As she does (or imagines doing so), “a tiny bit of deeper trust also began to grow within myself.” Her takeaway? Self-acceptance comes not just from embracing who you are, but from discarding ideas about who you aren’t. She doesn’t have to be a pilot or a captain, she’s relieved to report: “I write / I write.” But it seems the lesson she’s overlooking is not about who she is, but about how she could do what she does better: by paying a deeper level of attention.
As in her songs, the names Del Rey’s claimed as personal muses in these poems are all household names: Sylvia Plath. Bob Dylan. Georgia O’Keefe. It’s like she stunted: a perpetual liberal arts college student with a poster of Klimt’s “The Kiss” on her dorm room wall, aping sophistication and worldliness, skimming the required reading. Her interests stay stubbornly close to the surface, so there’s no depth to what she can reveal.
Yet what comes through most clearly in Violet is Del Rey’s desire to be taken seriously as a poet. “My life is my poetry / my lovemaking is my legacy” she proudly crows in “Salamander”—perhaps wishful thinking that she’ll be the one to decide how the public record stands. Throughout the collection, Del Rey reminds you that she’s lugging her typewriter everywhere. Throwing herself into her writing, poetry emerges as a kind of talisman for keeping romantic feelings at bay: “the / more / i step into becoming a poet / the less i will fall into / bed / with / you,” she writes in “Thanks to the Locals” (a poem acknowledging the impromptu support of an AA meeting), noting that it was a goodbye letter written to a lover that marked her start writing poetry.
It’s hard to imagine an established poet reaching out to embrace Del Rey as a peer, not to mention all the poets who have worked for years at their craft without any recognition at all. Many of them teach and take classes to be part of an exchange of knowledge and ideas. They’re part of a community.
Del Rey, if we are to judge by these poems, prides herself on being an outsider, self-taught. Her celebrity has given her this opportunity to bring this work out into the world, but it doesn’t make either a splash or a splat. It just lies there.
On the one hand, I admire her impulse to do what she wants: this collection of testaments to her own emotional experiences isn’t hurting anyone. But I also feel a little embarrassed for her. It seems so naïve to think this would succeed on any level. “Who am i?” she asks in “Quiet Waiter Blue Forever,” then answers, “just a girl in love dreaming on paper.” Clearly, Del Rey’s in love with the idea of being a poet—but seems willfully ignorant about the craft.
Over the years, many people have idolized misbegotten ideas about the “spontaneous prose” of Jack Kerouac and his contemporaries. It’s a romantic idea, that you could just sit down, type feverishly, and produce perfection without having to go back and change so much as a word. It’s also a myth, as the first-draft work Del Rey shares here unfortunately shows.
We’re given our own blank pages at the book’s end in a section called “notes for a poet,” interspersed with more of Sears’ oil paintings—crashing waves, orange slices and strawberries, a pink diving board, a can of beer in a paper bag, and a tree-lined stretch of highway—to record our own musings. A nice idea, but it’s hard to imagine anyone feeling sufficiently stirred. Del Rey’s poems don’t convey ambition so much as laziness.
Caught in a loop of her own self-obsession, Del Rey’s made a name for herself, and now wants to brand it as a poet. Yet Violet doesn’t say anything that Del Rey’s songs haven’t already told us, and in a less compelling way. It’s not the mold of a singer she needs to break out of, but the circularity of her limited ideas as a writer, regardless of genre. Some people say a groove is a grave, only not as deep.
