Last year, Joan Baez published her first-ever collection of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance, expressing her thoughts on personal and family life and some of her music peers. But a few months ago, different types of verse began flowing out of her. “I saw two masked men grab a boy, and [wrote] something about beating him up and letting him fall through the cracks onto a dungeon,” she says. “It was a tough one. But that’s how it started; that was the first one.”
From that point on, Baez, long a leading voice in the worlds of folk music and activism, has continued delving into topical poetry. Alternating between sarcastic putdowns and solemn expression, the works play off issues in the news, be they ICE raids or our current head of Homeland Security. “Little Green Worm,” printed below, is a pointed retort to Donald Trump. “When I’m present and looking out at my own yard and the trees and all of that, it’s still as beautiful as it ever was,” she says. “And then there are times of great sorrow and times of frustration, like everybody. And I found that the poetry helps — just doing it and getting it down on paper or on computer to keep my head above water.”
At the moment, Baez isn’t sure if she’ll gather her growing collection of topical verse into a book, and she doesn’t see them transforming into songs, either, especially given some of their irregular structures. “I spoke with other songwriters because I thought, ‘Why isn’t this working?’” she says of an early attempt. “And they said, from their experience, it doesn’t work trying to put poetry to music.”
As another type of relief, Baez is currently appearing two days a week as part of the Soiled Dove, an old-fashioned circus experience in Alameda, California, where she dances and sings two songs in character. “It’s wild and crazy and exhausting,” she says. “But I’ve always wanted to dance onstage, and it never kind of worked out. So I’m working all that out now, dancing and singing and all of it, me in a blonde wig. It’s one place where I really, honestly, God, forget all this shitstorm.”
During another conversation with Rolling Stone this past spring, Baez asserted, “Enjoying yourself has become an act of resistance.” Looking back on that comment a few months later, she reflects, “That’s still true, but I think it’s gone way beyond that now. It’s not enough. One has to start making good trouble. They say, ‘What can I do?’ You say, ‘Go volunteer for [something],’ and they say, ‘Oh.’ I just say that we may not be able to turn the tide yet, but we can certainly save some fishes.”
LITTLE GREEN WORM: A NOTE TO THE PRESIDENT
By Joan Baez
Since you are so comfortable
hiring people whose minds have
been by hollowed out by worms,
I’ve been thinking about
a little green worm that has
worked its way into
your anterior insular cortex,
the part of the brain
where empathy originates.
Empathy is the ability to understand,
feel, and share the emotions of
another person.
It is like a muscle,
which is to say:
you can develop it with practice.
The little green worm quickly devoured yours.
He then munched onward
until he came to
the prefrontal cortex,
which is involved in
impulse control
and regulating social behavior.
It’s meant to stop us from blurting out
vulgarities such as
“Grab her by the pussy” and
“Shithole countries” or accusing all
Mexican immigrants of being criminals,
rapists, and drug dealers.
There is one of your outbursts however,
which remains both
unfiltered and true:
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue
and shoot someone,
and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
What’s a little green worm to do
but munch on to the cerebrum,
which is the big one, responsible for thought,
language, memory, reasoning and learning,
for all the functions that make up basic
intelligence.
But oh shit: there’s nothing there.
