Eight Belles featured on Redpill

Childhood nostalgia strolls through Eight Belles, the debut from folk/chamber-pop trio Jessie Murphy in the Woods. Bright pop pieces, like “When I Am a Horse Again” and “Tour de Force,” have a brisk, positive sheen, but dig deeper and there is indirect darkness that pierces the songs’ surface sunshine. Organic instrumentation (panpipes, flute, clarinet, oboe and more) softens the dimmed edges of the nine-track album.

On “In the Woods” Murphy sings in a high, clear voice of sorrow and dying beautiful. “We Are the Ones” discloses the difference between dreams (romantic idealism) and reality (heartache and pain). Even humorous moments have a sober side. Whimsical “God Save Owen Wilson” reveals roses hide thorns. The recurrent theme of horses (the daydream of many little girls) is used as an escape mechanism (“When I Am a Horse Again”), but ultimately connotes suffering and death, as told during the true tale of the title track.

Hello Dear Listeners, Readers, and Watchers In The Woods -

We – Jessie Murphy In The Woods – have just completed the great adventure of releasing our first record, Eight Belles. We’ve put it out, we’ve played shows in homage to it, we’ve been interviewed about it, and we’ve traveled in support of it.

Now it’s time for something new.

It’s time to turn our attention from out put to input. We are seeking new sounds, words, ideas and inspirations. Part of our process of doing that is conversing with other artists and persons of serious intrigue. We’d like to share some of these conversations with you, 10 of them to be exact, in a series we call Thank You, Please, and Welcome to The Woods. We will be interviewing ten artists who are (by our lights) total luminaries in their craft. During these late August nights, surrounded by tall pines and whistling winds, we will warm ourselves by the fire of their intellect and we will share that warmth with you.

With no further ado – we Thank You, Please, and Welcome to The Woods, poet, Keetje Kuipers (pronounced Kaye-tchah Ky-purs).

We know Keetje from years ago when she attended Swarthmore college with Jessie’s brother, David LK Murphy. We want you to know about her because we are intoxicated by her verse, her sense of language, and her wisdom concerning things both wild and contained.

Her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in March 2010 by BOA Editions. You can find two of our favorite poems from this collection posted below and then you can read our interview with the lovely Keetje. Please do read the poems first – they speak so perfectly well for themselves.

Keetje Kuipers

Jessie: If song were one type of medicinal herb and poetry another, for which ailments would you prescribe the former, and which the latter?

Keetje: Music is for out-pouring, and poetry is for, well, in-pouring. We go to music—whether as listeners or performers—as a means of release: to explode with joy or sorrow, to call out our triumphs or failures. When we read or write poems, there is certainly an element of release and expression, but it is more an experience of implosion. While song reaches out for connection, poetry reaches within. This doesn’t mean that poetry doesn’t connect us to each other, but those connections move in the opposite direction: inward, ever inward, toward the source. So, if you ail along the lines of feeling something you cannot express, a surging of emotion that seeks release, then partake of music. And if you feel distracted, detached, unable to connect with yourself—in other words, if you are suffering a serious case of ennui—then reach for a book of poems. However, keep in mind, both are excellent when treating loneliness.

Jessie: You write of the wilderness and of the city. You also write of the wilderness in the city and citification of the wilderness. How do these two respective environments inspire and work on you differently? Do they change your perception and feeling for language?

Keetje: It’s difficult for me to write toward the wilderness without thinking about what separates me from it. My experiences as a city-dweller inform the way that I enter the woods and how I filter everything that happens there, whether I’m hunting with my father or sticking my feet in a mountain lake. At the same time, the differences between the wilderness and the city, as well as their obvious incompatibility, provide a point of examination for me: I’m interested in looking at what doesn’t fit when we try to come together as friends, lovers, enemies, companions, parents. Where the city and the wild meet is a landscape of abrupt collision, one that speaks directly to emotional questions and conflicts that I try to address in my work.

Jessie: The first poem in your book, “The Light Behind Her Head, the Bright Honeycomb of the Sky”, is one of our favorites. We imagined the title to mean the light of the sky behind the statue of liberty’s crown. How wrong are we?

Keetje: Not very wrong at all! When I lived in New York, I had an apartment on 15th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue. In the spring and summer, I would jog in the evenings along the Hudson, down past the Meat Packing District where they’ve redone the piers in astroturf. I’d run down that promenade in the evenings after work, the sun would be setting in the west, lighting Hoboken in pink, and I would keep my eyes on the Statue of Liberty as I ran south. When I wrote this poem, I wasn’t living in New York anymore, but the memory of that experience—its absolute physicality, the way moving through the city can be such an intense and multitudinous sensation—had just been brought back to me. The light is behind Liberty’s head, but it’s also behind the head of the speaker: she is still filled with the memory of that city’s light.

Jessie: Can you tell us please, everything else you know about this poem?

Keetje: Many of the poems in my book Beautiful in the Mouth address the experience of loss. This has to do in part with the fact that I first moved to New York a year after 9/11, and though I’d visited the city many times before then, I really got to know it as a resident as a place of mourning, healing, persistent fear, and determined rebirth. Partly, “The Light Behind Her Head…” is an attempt to encapsulate those simultaneous feelings: the surging toward life even as we fear what losses will come next. I wanted to physicalize that emotional experience, and so I tried to liken it to the most extreme of physical sensations, when we are simply flooded with touch and emotion. This might happen during sex. It might happen while sky-diving or swimming in the ocean. Either way, we are over-filled with all the forms that feeling can take, and those feelings often transport us: to other places, other times, other love affairs. The memories of those sensations become part of that present moment, sometimes as a form of comfort or an expression of joy.

Jessie: We were also exceptionally taken with your poem, “The Reno”. Can you please briefly tell us about the form and structure of this poem?

Keetje: My poems often take similar forms on the page, and I have two types that I lately seem to be returning to again and again. The first is the sonnet, or at least poems that look like sonnets: short, blocky chunks of text—about fourteen lines long, with ten-syllable lines. When I write those types of poems, they generally tend to make their poetic arguments in the same way: they turn, shift, or startle around the ninth line and then conclude with a very definitive resolution or declaration. The other kind of poem I often write is nothing like the sonnet-type poems in my book. This other kind, of which “The Reno” is one, is written in couplets and has longer lines that are broken not because of syllable count but because I am interested in jarring their inherent cadence. This creates a poem that is more disjunctive and unsettled. It follows then that these poems would lack resolution, though they persistently pursue it through many sets of images.

Jessie: Do you ever begin to compose a poem while listening to music?

Keetje: No, I never have, though I know many poets who do. For me, rhythm is a very important part of the poetic equation, and my poems need to make their own. I believe in the presence of musicality in poems in many other forms, as well—beyond rhythm and meter and cadence, I appreciate rhyme and assonance, for instance, in poetry. For me, writing a poem while listening to music would be akin to trying to write one song while listening to another one. I’m sure people do it, but I have difficulty imagining how you would separate one voice from the other. On the other hand, I often write while listening to poetry or fiction being read aloud. In those instances, I’m able to tune out the actual words and instead simply absorb the sensation of good language running through the air, entering my ears, maybe even vibrating the arms of the auditorium chair I’m seated in. I also very often compose poems while I’m hiking or running. Again, the natural, magical rhythms present in speech are recalled to me by the beat of my footsteps.

Jessie: Have you ever worked with a composer to set any of your poetry to music?

Keetje: Not yet, but I look forward to having that opportunity one day. Poetry is, of course, an oral tradition, and the ability to speak, sing, memorize, and recite poems has always been valued across cultures. Putting my poems to music seems like a natural progression to me, and I hope I someday have the chance to work with a musician who is interested in uncovering the music that is most likely already contained somewhere in my poems.

Jessie: What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?

Keetje: Peppermint—the kind with little chunks of candy canes in it.

Jessie: Would you rather have it in a bowl or right out of the box?

Keetje: Definitely a bowl. There is something so delicious about the way it slips around in the bowl as it melts!

Jessie: What poem (by an author other than yourself) would you read while eating said ice cream?

Keetje: Something from the collection of poems Tender Hooks, by Beth Ann Fennelly. The poems—which address the experience of motherhood in all its physical glory and horror—are juicy, lush, flavorful, mouth-filling. The first poem in the book is called “Bite Me”.

About Keetje

Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone, as well as awards from Atlanta Review and Nimrod. In 2007 she completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley. She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in March 2010 by BOA Editions. It contains poems currently published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others. You can also listen to her read her work— which has been nominated four years in a row for the Pushcart Prize—at the online audio archive From the Fishouse. Keetje teaches writing at the University of Montana and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She divides her time between San Francisco and Missoula, Montana, where she lives with her dog, Bishop, and does her best to catch a few fish.

www.keetjekuipers.com
www.boaeditions.org

Woods 2.0 enjoyed a lovely evening at Headgear Studio in W-Burg, Brooklyn recording some new music!  Can’t wait to share the tune, but you will have to patient!  These photographic highlights will have to suffice.

Quick reminder, we are playing at Webster Hall’s Marlin Room tomorrow night (7/7) at 9:00 p.m sharp.  Hope to see you all there!

Check out a review of Eight Belles by Andrew Duncan at Zap Town.

A barrier automatically goes up whenever you hear the singer/songwriter try to pull out their best John Renborn impression, and you start pulling out Terry Brooks epics with the actual intent of reading them.

Jessie Murphy In The Woods is not that outlandish in medieval lyric, but a song like “In The Woods” flails about with a framework of a Middle Age fantastical airiness to the song and melodic turpitude like Hildegard Von Bingen relenting about love-making. They romp about between gypsy revivalist — yes, they use a flute to saunter about — and acousticly-driving punk structures as Murphy sings “In the woods, the virgin forest…the human forest.”

When the trio gets serious and Jessie Murphy’s storytelling becomes a focal point (“Brilliant Sundays,” for example), it becomes entrancing, leaving you with thoughts of The Stones’ “Wild Horses” in your mind.

These bouts of serious contemplations are where the trio shines. “Pretty Machine” proves that the band can team excellent songwriting with expressively diverse musicianship (it helps they are all music teachers) and make it a lasting image in your mind.

Even something like the poignantly introspective, slightly snarky, “God Save Owen Wilson” is done well enough that you cannot help but dig into the philosophical elements of why they would write a song about Owen Wilson and why he is just like her. You begin to wonder just exactly what their perspective is on society. That is when you realize that Eight Belles is a creative work with songs that is a rare treat to experience in the realm of chamber folk construction

Check out these great photos taken by our talented friend Don Raziniewski after our CD release show at Webster Hall.  A few of our favorites are below; do check out his other amazing work.

you can also see the cool paper eyelashes in the shape of horses by paperself is these pictures

Our first Zombie song; meant to be take literally.  In our escape, we couldn’t leave behind Fuji the dog or Chatterbox the cat.

Tonight we are playing at Club Fandango @ The Buffalo Bar in London with CUTAWAYS + OUR MOUNTAIN + VAUGHAN KING

Brought to you by our friends at Club Fandango:

Tomorrow night is at the 229 with ROB COWEN & THE DISSIDENTS + AMORISTE + MATT ADEY

We are off and on our way to London! We have UK shows coming up on

Stay tuned for updates!