Hats and Glasses

#hatsandglasses #poetry15

I went out to hear some live music this week, and I noticed most of the performers were wearing dark sunglasses on stage, and even some wore hats with very wide brims. They looked effortless. Maybe stoned. “Cool,” I thought. But then I considered the why.

As I stood there in all the music and beautiful chaos of blaring lights and noise, I considered the human making the art, the body making the music: the heart and mind, eyes and ears up there in the strobing lights, haze, and thumping beat of the drums. How can the musicians nail those riffs in the midst of all the flashing lights? In the middle of sudden, unexpected blasts of sun-like strobes in the face? After all, I was standing there in the crowd wearing (as I do at shows) earplugs. I too, love live music and also don’t like loud noises. I love the desert and also need sunglasses when I am out walking around there. Why wouldn’t the performers have their own accommodations, too, when doing the hard, magical work of making the music come to life?

In hats and glasses, they were in it, sweating, singing, strumming, moving around. And all around them, the bright lights kept blaring on and off, beams of light were cutting through the stage and striating their bodies in an unnatural luminosity.

What would it be like to be standing there, guitar in hand, with all that light blaring right at you? And then singing through it?

I, too, would wear a wide-brim hat, to be able to make music in that wildness.

I, too, would wear the very dark sunglasses on stage at 10 PM.

There’s something we must do as writers, isn’t there, to shield ourselves when we are going into the depths of an experience and creating art from it? So we can get the really good work done? What that looks like for each of you might be different, but I think a crucial thing to be aware of is protecting yourself from the blaring light of the inner critic who appears right when you’re getting somewhere good.

Put on those metaphorical sunglasses and play right on through it.

As a companion poem to this prompt, here is Larry Levis’s “My Story in a Late Style of Fire.” Notice the lines, “But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if / I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.” Recently, Graywolf Press published his collected poems, Swirl & Vortex.

Prompt