Listen to Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass
By PHOENIX CARLISLE | Cover courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio
With Valentine’s Day and the first bouts of spring reaching through the cold, maybe what you truly need is a way to love yourself, to find yourself in the intertwining words from an award-winning lyricist. Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the work of collected poems from singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey. It explains her intimate feelings of her past, emotions of her own self-image and relationship while she navigates the concrete jungle of Los Angeles.
“Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many,” the New York Times best-selling author said about her book. “Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously, picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.”
The singer also brings her breathtaking poetry to life in an unprecedented audiobook. In this stunning spoken word performance, Del Rey reads 14 poems from her debut book, accompanied by music from Grammy Award-winning musician Jack Antonoff. The project solidifies her as “the essential writer of her times” (The Atlantic). This audiobook features her reading select poems from the book, including “LA Who Am I to Love You?,” “The Land of 1,000 Fires,” “Past the Bushes Cypress Thriving,” “Never to Heaven,” “Tessa DiPietro,” “Happy,” and several others. The result is an extraordinary poetic landscape that reflects the unguarded spirit of its creator.
I discovered Lana Del Rey, like many others, at 14 during the infamous COVID lockdown. Peak middle school with raging hormones and now the world around me felt destroyed. Del Ray is praised for her lyrics as she pulls lines from books or her other forms of inspirations to curate the feelings of being a woman. Even now, as I step into my adult life, I take comfort in her songs to navigate joys or hardships in my heart. She has become a cushion for my emotions and holding her personal poetry emphasizes that universal connection she continues to bring. Finding a true artist that you can always fall back to is extremely rare in this time of fast money media.
Now let’s talk about poetry itself. The typewriter font used for the connective style was a fantastic choice. Del Rey always uses a combination of classic forms from the ’60s and ’70s as well as rustic photographical styles as media visuals with her writing. One thing about her is that her first few dorms of media around her background, such as her music videos, were always beautiful forms of mixed media from old movies, her own photography and recordings that she would intentionally string together for the audience to immerse themselves into her art. This made her work in my view timeless; the work felt as though it was the personal record work of a lost starlet from the ’50s finding her true self under all the glamour and glitter or a wandering groupie from the ’70s navigating having a rocker boyfriend which in a way she was all of these. Her writing takes forms of who she’s been for the past decade and a half with her music blowing up. The poetical works of her life allow yourself to find her and find who you are in all the phases of your own life. This is what the seasonal shift is for. Finding time and love for yourself in all phases, even the ones you don’t want to go back to.
Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass has selected works of poetry that describe LA as simply as our town of Temple while finding ways you can discover yourself in hardships. I recommend reading the poetry on your own first, as to emphasize and interpret what you please, then finding the version of Del Rey reading her work, as to see what she found best to emulate and interpret.
Take time to listen to songs of her music as well; each of her albums has a specific vibe that brings out the best and worst of everything, from relationships to how we view ourselves. Her work is timeless and to support an artist is to support their phases of hardship because that’s where the true art lies.
