The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Kevin Simmonds
Kevin Simmonds discusses his new collection, THE MONSTER I AM TODAY.
...more
Posts Tagged: singing
Finding Healing in Gospel Music
I wasn’t pressured to be stoic. I was permitted to release. I was permitted to be.
...more
Swinging Modern Sounds #104: Paradise
For me, performance is a conversation with the sacred and timeless, the sublime.
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: “Dear G.B.”
There are many ways to be ripped to shreds.
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: “Lover to Lover”
It’s the atmosphere. The temperature. What lies between thee and me.
...more
Everything Is Happening All of the Time: Talking with Sven Ratzke
Sven Ratzke discusses his new show, WHERE ARE WE NOW.
...more
Hearing a Novella/Reading an Album: Talking with Katharine Coldiron
Katharine Coldiron discusses her forthcoming novella, CEREMONIALS.
...more
ENOUGH: Good Girls Don’t Sing
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
...more
Swinging Modern Sounds #94: I Think I Might
This is a deep dive, therefore, into the site of brilliant, uncompromising contemporary work.
...more
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Zola Jesus’s Natural World
About a year ago, I ended up returning to the land where I grew up and building a house here.
...more
Hitch in the Voice
I hear a man singing for his life, desperate in a way he would never be again and had never been before.
...moreAlbum of the Week: Molly Burch’s Please Be Mine
Torch songs, i.e. “sentimental love songs, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited love,” were once the flagship of every respected crooner: with sultry lonesomeness, a smooth voice would dance above the elegant orchestra accompaniment, singing of lovers lost or unreciprocated romance. Fitting comfortably in the gap between Angel Olsen and Lana Del Rey, […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Wanting To Dance
It just felt so comfortable to slide back into singing, “She Loves You,” and know for that moment, everything was the same.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Sword and Her Sister
Frozen is a study in what happens when imagination is constrained to a single narrative arc
...more
Deep Throat #7: On Being and Unbeing a Singer
He knew what he was doing when he looked at me and said, “Sing for me.” Had I been nude in his bed I would not have been as naked as I was then, stripped down to my brand new skin.
...more
Deep Throat #6: On Being and Unbeing a Singer
The gulf between the place where I sang Mozart and Debussy with people my parents’ age and the place where I went to public school and tried to make friends with kids my own was vast.
...more
Deep Throat #5: On Being and Unbeing a Singer
There is nothing I have experienced that is so physical, nothing that resonates in the bones and meat of a person like it does to make music with other people at that sort of level.
...more
Deep Throat #4: On Being and Unbeing a Singer
It is not a coincidence that among the synonyms for “practice” is “ritual,” and for “ritual,” “practice.” When you do a thing over and over—even if it is only so banal and small as lighting a cigarette—it will assume a shape and a meaning, a weight and a force.
...more
Deep Throat #3: On Being and Unbeing A Singer
It would be easy and satisfying to say that I stopped singing because of the crack in my throat. It would be false. It’s true enough that there was one. There was a fight with a lover that turned ugly, a forearm pressed hard across my throat
...more
Deep Throat #2: On Being and Unbeing A Singer
My face burned with rage, with shame, with humiliation. I was failing openly, blatantly, at the one thing I still somehow, in the back of my mind, expected to be perfectly capable of doing after more than a decade’s silence.
...more
Deep Throat #1: On Being and Unbeing a Singer
When I shut my mouth I lost a part of myself so ingrained, so accustomed, so integral I had not even known it was possible to lose it.
...more