The American Dream, Melancholy, Literary References, Ginsburg, Whitman, and Dusty Noon. Lana Del Rey’s 2020 volume will take you to Los Angeles, walk you through the streets of Melrose and at the end of the day, listen to the sound of the wind whispering with you in Long Beach. Perhaps the United States has never seen something like this before.
The Violets lean back on the grass Not just a book of poems, but a bittersweet love letter to California.
We had to wait two years, but in 2022 the singer’s book will be available in Hungarian, translated by Marton Simon and Agnes Rika Toth. The duo was a great choice, as they can almost perfectly convey Lana’s style. You can read many poems in the volume, and the singer often lets her thoughts flow, but the end of the book is full of haiku. Size is also special in appearance. Next to the poems, color photographs of Lana and archival black and white photographs can be seen. Typewriter font and handwritten corrections draw the reader between the pages.
Most of the poems refer to Beat poetry, which is no coincidence, because Lana considers poets Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman her biggest inspirations. At the beginning of this volume, Who Am I to Love You? He feels more in his work titled The poem reminds us of America Ginsburg with its long lines and its address to America, specifically Los Angeles in Lana’s case. The singer describes all his feelings associated with the city, there are love and hate, remorse and pleading at the same time. The work raises the question of where we belong and whether it is worth escaping from our identity.
The volume is full of love poems, but to me stands out the most work that Lana wrote about her struggle with herself. An example is the work of Tessa DePetro, the first line of which strikes the reader in the heart:
“No one has ever approached me without wanting to kill me,” the singer begins. The name of the real person can be read in the title of the poem. Tessa DiPetro is a spiritual healer and mediator that Lana has visited in real life. The most powerful and painful moment of the work is when the singer compares one of Jim Morrison’s concerts to the concert of heaven and the music to God, and then the medium reacts like this at the end of the poem:
Oh – and Jim passed away at the age of 27. So find another base of reference if you’re from heaven
He will speak.
This is perhaps the best way to describe Lana Del Rey’s poetry and music. Romantic tragedy accompanies the singer’s work, despite being attacked for it. This also appears in his poem Thanks to Their Places, where he describes an abusive and toxic relationship he is trying to get out of. The work painfully describes how difficult it is to get out of such a situation, and the last two lines of action leave the reader with a stagnant void:
I was so brave on my own
It was easier for me to stay
While Lana Del Rey clearly loves the United States, she’s not afraid to express her frustration with the country. In his poem “A Too Fragile Eden,” he talks candidly about the wildfires continually ravaging California, paranoid leaders—in this particular case, Donald Trump—and how interest in culture is waning. The work draws attention to the destruction and impact of our surroundings. Lana’s ambivalent feelings for her country are evident throughout the volume, and thus the singer’s sweet and sour nostalgia can be heard not only in her songs, but also read on paper.
In the volume, one or two lines of small ideas appear several times between the poems. For example, “The universe exists because we know about it.” These, although at times a bit tacky, still fit perfectly into the atmosphere of the book.
Lana Del Rey appears to be a novice poet, and some works look more like wandering diary entries than complex poems. However, there is a feeling that the singer has a special penchant for poetry. In front of us we can see every street and bush she describes, we can feel we’ve wandered through the singer’s mind, and at the end of the volume we fall in love with America with Lana.
(Cover image: Lana Del Rey. Photo: Michael Kovac/WireImage/Getty Images)
