I Am Signaling You Through The Flames

San Francisco, May 18, 2025

I took this photo last month in the heart of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s San Francisco, standing outside the famous and beloved City Lights Books, with Jack Kerouac, his ghosts, a fun collection of tourists, and a small-but-determined group of regulars day-drinking at Vesuvio Cafe behind me. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I’d just flown into town from Los Angeles. Not too great a distance to travel, but enough miles to make a difference to my state of mind. In Los Angeles, I’d played a couple of shows and walked the boardwalk at Venice Beach. Here, I’d play shows too, but instead of hitting the waterfront, my first port-of-call was the bookstore.

I love bookstores. I love the smell of the paper stock. I love the gentle hum of the air conditioner, and the quiet enthusiasm of readers as they go about their browsing. I love knowing that I’ll never have the time to read all the books I want to read, but that I’ll keep getting new books. Here at City Lights, I’ve come in pursuit of poetry. How could I not come in pursuit of poetry?

American poet and book publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the store with sociologist Peter D. Martin in 1953, and founded his publishing company, City Lights Publishing two years later. Born on the other side of the world a mere three decades down the road, I found out about this place when I was 19-years-old and living in Sydney, Australia. In my city, we had many wonderful places to buy books, but we didn’t have anything like City Lights. I was an undergrad at Sydney University, studying English Literature and Australian Literature, with a minor in Going To Watch Bands All Night Instead of Doing School Work. I was reading all kinds of new (to me) and exciting stuff, and found myself particularly thrilled by American poets like William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and of course, Mr F. :

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

When I first read these lines, all those years ago, I took them as an invitation. But I had no idea how to RSVP. I scribbled bad couplets in my notebook occasionally, but I was far more comfortable writing essays about poetry than dabbling in it myself. And when the time finally came for me to put my education to good use, I steered away from poetry and into a more practical vocation for a young lady of low means: journalism. But I soon found out that even with a 5AM news reading gig as my day job, I was still going out all night listening to live music. Sooner or later, something would have to give, and, thanks to a hefty amount of youthful magical thinking, music won. And so I set about the long and winding road that led me to writing songs, and recording songs, and eventually… moving to America.

You are an American or a non-American

Songs are not poems, and poems are not songs. Poetry, I think, is much harder. You can get away with a lot when you’ve got music behind you. There’s a few incredible songwriters who do both, of course. I don’t claim to be one of them. Just as I don’t claim to be American. But I’m getting close. I’ve lived here for more than a quarter of my life now. Never on the West Coast, though. Always in Nashville, Tennessee. We have some majestic bookstores here too: the brilliant writer and memoirist Anne Patchett has a lovely store in Green Hills named Parnassus, after the mountain where the muses lived in Greek mythology. On the Eastside, there’s The Bookshop, which is an exceptionally curated small space with a focus on female authors. And for the thrifty among us, there’s McKay’s: a gigantic space where you can buy, sell and trade books and records.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times…

A few years back, I wrote a song that riffed on this idea. I called it “The Soft Apocalypse.” It was a hybrid: a love song and a protest song, about two people (myself, my husband) slowly descending into madness while living in a red state during the pandemic era. At the time of writing, I was not actually mad, but songs can be prophecies, and unfortunately, I did suffer a breakdown a few years after writing it. But that is a longer story, for a different time. And it belongs in an essay about altogether different poets than the Ferlinghetti kind.

Still, I’m interested in answering the challenge of apocalyptic times whatever that might mean. They do, after all, seem to be recurring. I’ve got a new album coming out later this year and it is most certainly my attempt to do that.

The first single, “No Happy Endings” landed this week. You can listen to it here.