Having released her fantastic debut album earlier this year, our journalist spoke to poet and singer-songwriter Kara Jackson about the process behind Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, her experience as youth poet laureate for the United States, and what it means to be a young artist in the modern world.
So, for those who don’t know, who is Kara Jackson, and why is she questioning why the Earth gives us people to love?
I am a twenty-three-year-old musician and singer-songwriter from the Chicago land area, and ‘Why Does the Earth…?’ is a question that is really born out of grief and was initially asked in the context of grief after losing one of my friends. But in the context of the album it became a question that guided the whole album because I think it is a collection of experiences with people in general. It’s a question that can be applied more broadly: why do we have to love each other and why are we even here? Why are people annoying sometimes? It’s just weird to deal with, also.
With your path to becoming youth laureate, do you remember the first time(s) you had that urge to express your experience through poetry or music? And how did you go about it for those first times, utilising your poetry?
I started writing… I wrote songs first before I wrote poems so I think for me poetry was always something, I liked reading poems when I was younger but it always felt divorced from real life because I was reading a lot of old people who are not alive. Like Edgar Allen Poe who I loved. But I didn’t see myself as a poet until I was older and, through spoken word, I was reading poets who looked like me and were contemporary poets that I started to really envision myself as poetry. So I joined my spoken word club at my high school when I was fifteen and I started writing a lot and it became an outlet for me to express my teenage feelings for the most part. I think I saw a larger point in terms of engaging with larger issues and systemic issues and also discovering different parts of myself. Those were my first trials and errors of poetry. Then I became serious before my eyes. I don’t think I planned on making a career out of it or becoming laureate, I didn’t know what that was.
Bridging the gap between your poetry and music, in 2019, how did your Song for Every Chamber of the Heart EP come to fruition while balancing the release of Bloodstone Cowboy? Was there a need to balance two separate frames of mind as products of your different disciplines or did their releases run parallel together?
I think it was definitely intentional to release them both at around the same time but I think it was also something that, it was a coincidence that I ended up starting to think about intentionally. The process of writing the book was a separate process that kind of encompassed the laureateship because I was youth laureate of Chicagoland before I was national laureate. So, part of that process was that Chicago youth poet laureates are responsible for writing a book. So that was a process I had to do. Then, simultaneously, just while I had time, because I had taken time off from school to be a laureate, so I was also just at home. I had worked on some songs and my friend Kaina, who later became one of my collaborators for the debut album, she really encouraged me to release the songs. So, I decided to release them really concurrently almost. She happened to be releasing her debut album so I wanted to have something put out to perform because she asked me to support her for her release shows. So it just kind of ended up being the right time.
With composing Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, what differences did you find there to be in composing a unite album music piece in comparison to written poetry, how was the trial and error of building the album and what did it look like?
I definitely think working on my debut album, I’m really proud of it because I ultimately think it was probably the most effort I have put into something. You know, I think the EP was really sparse and had a whole different sound in a lot of ways. The album was that sound expanded and presented with a lot more nuance. It was an effort of many years and of many friends. Being able to work on it with Noamoto and Nom Dee and Kaina, I feel like we just really worked very hard and the album in a lot of ways really communicates that, down to even the sounds. Like everything is a genuine effort. It has been really cool to see the songs – some of which I have known myself for many years – take on a new life, now that they’re released. I think a lot of the response has been unprecedented too. It’s really wild everything coming to fruition because of it being a few years of work.
To apply your musical and poetic pursuits to a single track on the new album – my personal favourite “Rat” – can you talk through the conception and composition of that particular track?
I think “Rat” is actually one of my favourite songs on the album but initially I think I was inspired by just the tradition of folk music in general to have an oral and narrative element to it. There’s a big history of, so many of my favourite folk songs are songs that have been passed down for centuries. So I think I wanted to have a nod to that tradition and to take on the role as a storyteller myself. In a way I was inspired a lot by singers and writers like Joni Mitchell and Joanna Newsom who take on these really long narratives that force you to really listen to the story in the song. So I really wanted to approach that form of writing myself. I think it started as this really sparse song that I wrote for my guitar and it really organically built off of that. There are some really interesting sounds. Like there’s this car sound that is just my friend’s car that we all recorded and a lot of really cool slide sounds that my friend Jodie recorded. So, yeah that’s “Rat.” I think it’s connected to the general theme of the album in terms of dealing with people and also a grief that kind of seems to be connected to the American story. There are a lot of promises tied to the “American Dream.” A lot of people come here and aspire for greatness and I think there’s a lot of grief in the very sobering reality that those dreams are very unattainable.
What do you find cannot be communicated or reflected through your poetry?
I’m sure there are things that I haven’t been able to really express or figure out how to, because I haven’t figured it out yet. But there are just so many things with the human experience, especially being in the time we’re in. Being a young person, because I’m sure it’s felt by yourself as well, such a weird time to be alive and be a young person and try to fit in in society and do even basic things every day. I think for a long time we as a society were able to tap into these mundane things and habitual, everyday activities that distract us. Then things that have been happening in the past few years, from pandemics to climate disasters, mean that you can’t look past those things or distract yourself from them. That reality has been really hard for me to articulate musically and it has been interesting to make art during such a weird time. I think of my parents’ time, they’re in their sixties, much of the music of their youth is protest songs commenting on the reality they’re in. I don’t think our generation has that same commitment musically or artistically to comment on what we are experiencing. I think the most popular artists are a disconnect from what they’re experiencing now. I find it to have been really difficult to reconcile or reckon with what we have in a real way that isn’t just really corny or completely nihilistic.
Who has taught you the most so far in your life, both generally and perhaps musically? And in what ways?
I’m really heavily influenced by my family and I’ve grown up with a really close-knit family and I have just one brother, so we’ve always been really close. But I think that I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration just from being the youngest, which necessitates being humble, being the youngest sibling. Because nothing started with you. You’re kind of inheriting everything. There were so many stories that I was able to absorb being the youngest growing up. Stories where I wasn’t there, where I had to work out where I was during all the things people were talking about. I think that really humbled me and continued to humble me because being in a family like mine has taught me how you really can’t achieve anything by yourself. It almost serves as checks and balances how being in a family like mine, you’re not really the most important one. Sometimes you might be the most important as the youngest, and I’m the only girl. I was definitely spoiled in my own ways. But then there’s definitely that sense of all the things that happened before me. And I’m honoured to hear of all the women who came before me, just growing up with my grandma’s stories. So I think those are probably the people who have impacted me the most and then my mentor Jamila Woods has especially impacted on me as an artist and as a human being. These are people who have really affected my work and how I am presented in this industry. I’m trying to be a humble person and a normal person.
What would you recommend to a fan who is attempting to make sense of the world around them and their personal experience by using poetry as a medium, in finding their feet and benefitting themselves?
I would say, really take time to develop your own voice and I think it’s okay when you’re just starting out for that voice to not be so loud or defined. It definitely takes time to become your own self. It’s okay to rely on other people and other people’s examples when starting out. I’ve done so many workshops based on other people’s poems or taking someone else’s form as a skeleton for your own. I think that stuff is really okay and you should read a lot of other people’s work to familiarise yourself with the craft in general and allow yourself to be guided to what you want to say yourself. I think that process is very long, to find what is authentic to you. Just be patient with yourself is what I would say.
As you look into the future of a musical career, to support yourself, what would you pass onto your past self as current wisdom and what wisdom would you currently ideally want to receive from your future self?
To my past self, I would definitely say let go of your need to control things because you’ll never get the amount of control over your life that you desire. It just doesn’t exist. For my future self, considering the age I am right now, I don’t even know if I need to hear something from my future self. I would just love to be approached by the thirty-year-old me and just for them to give me some kind of thumbs up or confirmation that I have successfully made it through these years. I think that’s what I would like to know: thirty years old having a quick check in, just to know I’m okay.