tres by Jaded Azurites

In December 2019, I gave myself a project to write ten poems in 30 days. I’d write first drafts in the first ten days, second drafts in the second ten days and by the end of the month I’d have a batch of new work. I’m a slow poet, however, and at the end of December I had scraps of ideas half-baked and gerrymandered into ten bad poems. I didn’t want to give up, so I kept working into January, then into February. In March I thought, To hell with this pandemic, my December poems are just starting not to suck! Tres, the third Jaded Azurites EP, is not really a pandemic EP, although it creeps in at the edges. “Pinaceae” is sort of about pine trees and sort of about how overwhelmed nurses might feel seeing one Covid patient after another. “Ameristop” is about weird interpersonal connections in times of not touching. I gave Mike Watt my December-to-pandemic poems and he picked these five for bass compositions. I think they are the most deceptively simple of our songs so far. His phrases have the elegance of perfectly turned lines; sometimes his chord changes feel like storms blowing in. Sometimes I feel like his bass and my words are walking down a street together, side by side but with different gaits. Mike’s compositions ask me to be thoughtful with my delivery. He teaches me not to rush. I like how, in Canto XXIII, both bass and voice go completely silent. In that song, a relationship is in big trouble and those silences are full of foreboding. Paradoxically, as bandmates on opposite coasts, never in the same room, I feel we are more comfortable together than ever before. Maybe that’s how these songs relate to the pandemic: they are together, apart. Necessity becomes asset. Solaces are shared.

Jaded Azurites is poet Karen Schoemer and bassist Mike Watt.

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