Climbing aboard a stool plucked from the 7th Street Entry’s barroom, local poet Éireann Lorsung offered a self-introduction. “I don’t know if you’ll believe this, but I’ve never opened for a band before.” Peering through a red fog of stage light at a small but enthusiastic crowd, the prim and somewhat elfin-looking twenty-six-year-old added, “I’ve never read in the dark before either.”
As she began to read poems, some from her debut book, Music for Landing Planes By, published in February by Milkweed Editions, her face became frozen in a tight smile. She enunciated crisply, stretching the occasional “o” and clipping a consonant every now and again, betraying her native Minnesota accent. The crowd clapped heartily at the end of her first poem, “Neighborhood 2,” a remembrance of shopping as a girl at a Russian grocery and fabric store with her mother.
“No, no, no, no. Maybe when it’s done—if you want to,” she blurted, waving her arm elbow to wrist.
The applause bore on, however. And a few poems later, Lorsung acknowledged, “Oh, the clapping does fill the empty space. I go to all these readings and we don’t clap.” Earnestly, she posed a question of her audience: “Do you clap between songs?” Realizing she had revealed a certain uncoolness about herself, she added, “I go to a lot of concerts, you can tell.”
The unlikely chain of events that led Lorsung to read her delicate works in this dungeon-like venue began earlier this year when St. Paul-based singer and songwriter Ben Weaver discovered her book, before it was even released, while considering printshops for his own just-published collection of poetry, Hand-Me-Downs Can Be Haunted. Lorsung’s book was given as a work sample. “I don’t know; I just read stuff and know whether I like it,” said Weaver, an avid reader and writer who favors the late Mississippi author Larry Brown as well as contemporary performing artist-filmmaker-writer Miranda July. Music for Landing Planes By is rather a playful, optimistic book, rich with appreciative passages about babies, birds, and ex-boyfriends. The book has a way of nudging forth a reader’s sense of wonder at the natural world. These themes struck a chord with Weaver.
And so the celebrated twenty-seven-year-old troubadour, who vaguely resembles an unshaven teddy bear, began sending Lorsung compliments and other encouraging missives. While she was teaching in France last year, he suggested, via email, that she stop by the Rex, a Parisian dance club. He mailed her a copy of his fifth and latest CD, Paper Sky. In the end, Weaver invited Lorsung to be an opening act at his CD release concert at the Entry on May 11.
The two met in person for the first time a few weeks before the show. It was a sunny morning in late April at Java Jack’s coffeehouse in South Minneapolis. “When I saw your CD, I knew why you liked my book,” Lorsung chirped, referring to the minimalist line-drawing of a pastel flock of circling birds that graces Weaver’s album cover (by UK artist Becky Blair). Even the casual reader/listener would be hard-pressed to miss how closely the album art aligns with prominent themes from Lorsung’s book—most notably, her description of “marshlands full of birds.”
Weaver concurred. “You know, when my mom read your book, she said, ‘It’s really funny, she has a lot of the same images you have on your record.’” Liken Weaver’s lyric, “a child trailing a finger in the water over the end of a boat,” for example, to this line from Lorsung: “touch the end of salt pond with a finger.” The CD and book also share fascinations with floating, flying, blood, and guts.
“I feel like this is the Postal Service or the Bright Eyes of poetry,” Lorsung said, comparing her writing to the lyrics of these popular indie bands. “I wanted this to be really specific to the aesthetic of this time.” With that, the two began bandying descriptions of a shared aesthetic that defines these times—for them and also for a whole, not-so-jaded generation of twenty-something artists.
“It’s sort of self-deprecating,” offered Weaver.
“It’s dry,” said Lorsung. “And I’m tired of irony. I’m earnest. I mean to be earnest. I would like to write things that make promises. I would like to write things that make people fall in love and make people happy.”
Weaver spat out the names of his least favorite writers: Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace. “These are people I can’t stand,” he said.
“Yes, thank you!” cried Lorsung. “I think there’s a place for intellect but not that pooh-poohs everything.”
Now, about the small matter of opening his rock show: “Can I get a stool?” asked Lorsung. “I just don’t like standing up.”
When her reading at the Entry was finished, Lorsung was treated to an intimate, high-quality rock show. Weaver and his band bowed, strummed, and crooned their way through an introspective set of world-weary, vivid country-rock songs.
“I want to thank Éireann Lorsung for reading tonight,” said Weaver in his graveled yet gentle Leonard Cohen-like burr. “She says she likes the banjo. And so I’m going to play this song for her.” With that, he serenaded all present with the banjo-rich lament “Rain Leaves Smoke,” a song with the fitting lyric about a friend that “needs a fire to burn things back to pure.”
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