What does Lana del Rey, Mitski, and sad girl poetry all have in common? They are emotionally raw and introspective.
From Rupi Kaur to Sylvia Plath, “sad girl” poetry is all over social media. These poets take their emotion and pain and paint it on the page. But it isn’t just poetry popping up on everyone’s feed; It’s music.
Musicians Lana del Rey and Mitski are two artists whose lyrics are often shared as though they are poems lifted right out of a chapbook.They are complex, vulnerable, and full of stark imagery that really speaks to listeners. But, what makes these posts so shareable is that you’d never know they were lyrics from a song
Music and poetry have always gone hand in hand. They make the same elements, emotion and experience, and build the same tools, metaphor, beat, and rhyme. However, not every song is a poem with a soundtrack. So, what is it about Lana del Rey and Mitski that sets their music apart and so firmly in the world of poetry?
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Sad Girl Poetry
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Lana and Mitski are popular for their “sad girl” indie-pop music. Like sad girl poetry, their music centers around themes of longing, introspection, and complex femininity, all with a side of melancholy. It’s cathartic.
Sad girl poetry is a way for readers and poets to validate their feelings. Tackling themes of loneliness, heartbreak, and mental health, these poems prove that it’s okay to not be okay.
The original sad girl poet is Sylvia Plath. When she put her pen to paper she wasn’t subtle. She wrote about her pain in a way that readers couldn’t dismiss as “strong feelings” or “hysteria.” Plath refused to be told that her feelings were too much.
Mitski’s music resists an easy fix. Lana del Rey’s songs scoff at redemption arcs. Neither artist is interesting a “healing journey.” They write about what it feels like to be in your feelings. After all, maybe these feelings aren’t something that needs a “fix.”
More Poetry of Sad Girls
The Collected Poems, by Sylvia Plath
I Don’t Want to Be Understood
A transsexual woman pieces together fragmented details of a repressive religious childhood and an unsupportive family, drawing from autobiographical experiences of the poet’s life.
I Don’t Want To Be Understood is a work of resistance against the conventional trans narrative, and a resistance against the idea that trans people should have to make themselves clear and understandable to others in other to deserve human rights. This is a compelling, urgent collection about the body and survival that asks how we learn to love in a culture where normal is defined by exclusion and discrimination.
These poems stretch from childhood to the present day–resisting typical narratives of self-discovery, resilience, and personal growth–and instead asks what it means to be granted or denied personhood by the world around you. It is a personal archive of a trans life laid out in all its messiness and unknowability, and is a book for anyone who has questioned why we place so many limitations on who gets to be considered a human being. These poems do not celebrate survival, but rather ask why transsexuals and other gender non-conforming people must fight so hard to survive in the first place.
The Complete Poems, by Anne Sexton
The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton comprises the poet’s ten volumes of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Live or Die, as well as seven poems from her last years.
From the joy and anguish of her own experience, Sexton fashioned poems that told truths about the inner lives of men and women.
“Women poets in particular owe a debt to Anne Sexton, who broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the way because of the flamboyance of her subject matter…Sexton has earned her place in the canon.”–from the Foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin
Something Bright, Then Holes, by Maggie Nelson
While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson’s incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, and―perhaps most frightening of all―freedom.
The World’s Wife, by Carol Ann Duffy
Carol Ann Duffy reworks myth and history, giving ancient stories a sharp, contemporary edge.
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, by Warsan Shire
The full-length poetry collection by Warsan Shire. She introduces a young girl who, without a nurturing guide, charts her own path toward womanhood.
Drawing from life, pop culture, and headlines, Shire captures vivid truths of refugees, immigrants, mothers, daughters, Black women, and girls.
In Shire’s hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life, full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. It’s fragrant life, full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life, full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl. The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets. This book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.
Satan Says, by Sharon Olds
Ararat, by Louise Glück
Louise Glück, the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, was an era-defining poet: innovative, brave, and wholly individual. Her work has left an indelible mark on the literature of our nation and of the world.
Ararat, Glück’s fifth collection of poetry, centers on the death of her father. Here she creates a ruthlessly probing family portrait and confronts the difficulties and intricacies of a daughter’s relationship to her parents. The result is subtle. Determined collection in which the poet interrogates both her own life and the whole world that emanates from it.
“I was born to a vocation,” she writes. “to bear witness / to the great mysteries. / Now that I’ve seen both / birth and death, I know / to the dark nature these / are proofs, not / mysteries–“
