Pure Poetry #4: Has Anyone Ever Heard of This ‘Andrea Gibson?’

Pure Poetry Week:

#1 – 2/23/2011 – Intro & Def Poetry Jam, by Riese
#2 – 2/23/2011 – Eileen Myles, by Carmen
#3 – 2/23/2011 – Anis Mojgani, by Crystal
#4 – 2/24/2011 – Andrea Gibson, by Carmen & Katrina/KC Danger
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We know you’re gay and you like Andrea Gibson. In fact, you really like her. Maybe you know some of her poems by heart, maybe you watch her videos on YouTube while wearing headphones and in your room. Maybe you met her and cried on her shoulder for an hour and a half after watching her performance at your prestigious all-women’s college. In any case, you know who she is. (We bet you liked her before you were gay, too.) You were just one of those girls…who liked Andrea Gibson.

We don’t need to tell you anything you don’t already know. It’s like saying, “Hey, have you heard of this singer/songwriter Ani DiFranco? You should really check her out.” So in order to include Andrea Gibson in this article, because we know you want us to, we decided to pay homage to her by watching her on YouTube and writing in notebooks.

And VOILA: The Thought Diaries of (Girls Listening to) Andrea Gibson

Poem: “Maybe I Need You”

This poem, especially when Gibson reads it in this video (we thought she was singing at one point, but actually she’s not, though you can keep swooning), makes clear one of the most important parts of her style: its incohesive nature and its dangerous rambling. Gibson writes what she feels – for real. Not from the outside, but from inside of every action she tells stories about.

This song also proves one of her strongest elements as an artist: that Gibson has a voice that is constantly relevant and familiar and always makes you think oh my god this has GOT TO BE about me, fuck all the other poems I have ever read this is the one. Writing love poems is hard and the result is often trite. Unless you like, invented sonnets (bitches love sonnets). Many poets this through vague, involved metaphors and references and, most markedly, a refusal to name the theme itself: love. Andrea Gibson refuses to complicate it. Her metaphors are clever and involved but easy to follow because the feeling is easy to relate to. What’s complicated is the abstractness of the feeling, and so she relays it in a way that we can regard as tangible: a romanticized re-telling of her personal experiences.

An excerpt from Carmen’s diary about this song features this quote:

“i think andrea gibson can only be read by andrea gibson. i think andrea gibson should hold me. i would like to hold andrea gibson back. i think andrea gibson would like to cuddle.”

A note from Katrina on Carmen’s diary says:

“Probably Andrea Gibson would cuddle you by holding you and looking far off into the distance, lamenting over her lost loves and poor choices and already feeling nostalgic about this particular cuddle session. Brooding is so fetch right now.”


Poem: “Stay”

This is probably your favorite Andrea Gibson poem. If you felt like Carmen while listening to it, you wrote nothing in your dream journal (Katrina wishes you could see Carmen’s dream journal. It is so full of lesbian wonder). But Carmen does feel like Gibson imagines the world the way it really feels when you can’t articulate it.

Andrea Gibson is a little bit uncomfortable sometimes. This is probably because she delivers much of her poetry through spoken word. You can be alone with a poem, but you can’t be alone with Andrea Gibson reading you a poem in her Andrea Gibson Poetry Voice. Especially, I would imagine, if this was happening in a room full of people. She exposes us to what feels like our own most intimate sentiments, only for us to find that these sentiments are what we have in common.

Poem: “Photograph”

This poem is the reason we wrote this article, if we can be completely honest. Carmen heard it for the first time in high school and was literally overwhelmed with its honesty and its heartbreaking passion. These are her real uncensored feelings. She still feels this way about the lyrics but we, upon listening to this poem multiple times before, after, and in between parties, have decided it also might do better as one of the Gibson poems you do not hear with a soft, strumming guitar in the background.

What “Photograph” proves is that Gibson makes you so empathetic that you are compelled by her long-winded and poignant feelings, so much so that you can see just how real the emotions underlying them are. She speaks about a person as a home (and did it before Edward Sharpe) To which Katrina of course posed, “are these all about the same person?” We don’t have a definite answer… but we think that it is yes.

But whether or not these are all about the same person is not the point. Gibson, who is often so linear, seems to be obsessing over events in the past while her feelings remain in the present. Yes. We said it: Andrea Gibson transcends the boundaries of time.

It’s true though. Sometimes she’s a bit overwrought, sometimes she’s a bit uncomfortable, sometimes things feel too personal, but come on man, she’s Andrea Fucking Gibson. She says it. She says it out loud. And that’s reason to listen.

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phoenix

phoenix has written 64 articles for us.

32 Comments

  1. asdfghjkl; you guys. andrea fucking gibson. also, i’ve been afk lately, but holy shit, poetry week on AS.

    DOUBLE THE LOVE.

  2. I convinced my allergictogayculture mom to watch a performance of “I Do” on youtube and she WEPT. Just saying. Andrea Gibson makes my heart overflow.

  3. OMGYES. She makes my heart feel like it’s about to explode. I’m afraid that one more poem may prove fatal. SO WORTH THE RISK.

  4. how crazy is it that i was halfway through reading this and checked my email and there was an invite to go to a free andrea gibson show.

    she’s awesome, says all the right things.

  5. Andrea Gibson is who I listen to when I want to feel closer to “god”, which is a word used to describe humanity’s best qualities. If she was the head of the church, or the head of the state, or even just required lsitening for every school student in the world, earth would be a more hopeful place.

    Also, I just so happened to get some her words and imagery tattooed on my person a couple of weeks ago. I think it;s going to be the start of a tradition.

  6. I love this. I could listen to Blue Blanket all day. And Pole Dancer. And For Eli.
    Basically everything.
    HER VOICE.

  7. Reason #238 I love Autostraddle: It introduced me to Andrea Gibson.

    I’d never heard of her until a little while ago when someone in a comments section linked to “Ashes” and I cried and cried. I don’t remember who it was that linked it, but I’m damn grateful!

  8. Andrea performed at my university during pride week last year. She’s absolutely BRILLIANT. Her poetry is intense and beautiful and incredibly thought- and feeling-provoking. I love her.

    I first heard I Do, then For Eli, and now plenty of others. I have them practically memorized, and what’s funny is I had been watching a few videos of her on youtube just before coming here!

  9. I feel like my heart is overflowing. But maybe it’s just my eyes because they’ve spontaneously decided to cry.

    The feeling of hearing her for the first time.

  10. I love andrea gibson, this is great by the way! :D she rocks and i think she would totally cuddle. anywho yeah I think i first heard of her here on this site, so again to autostraddle you guys rock!

    H

  11. I love her so much. I just discovered her a month ago and I melted… melted, you guys! Amazing, right? Do they bottle the essense of Andrea Gibson somewhere? I want that.

  12. one afternoon in spring I was sitting on the rug. there was sun shining in the window through the green leaves. I clicked on a link from somewhere (probably Autostraddle) and then I saw Andrea Gibson for the first time (Jellyfish, I think). It was like being kicked in the face. Kicked in the face by a giant boot made of lust and feelings.

  13. I discovered Andrea Gibson about a month ago and holy shit, I fell in love.

    I’ve known I was bi for a while, and in January I started my first relationship ever, with a girl who lives about 200 miles away. Her poem Asking Too Much kind of sums up how I feel about her. Everything she does is magic. I love how personal she is – I’ll probably never get to see her live (seeing as I live in the UK) but I feel like I know her. One day, I hope I can write poetry that inspires the same sort of emotion in everyone.

    I was reading For Eli in Drama last week because I was proposing putting it into our performance, and the entire class stopped and watched me. They told me I was good, but I had to explain to them that nothing tops Andrea Gibson.

  14. I love Andrea Gibson. God, do I love her and, more importantly, her poems. They might just be the most inspiring things I’ve ever witnessed. My favorite is her poem “Yellowbird”. Find it on her album of the same name. That’s the only way to hear it.

  15. OHMY, I love her so much. I’ve actually been wondering if autostraddle had any articles about her work, and I gasped out loud when I saw this.

    I’m from Boulder (where she lives) and have some SWEET connections, so I’ve actually met her a couple times and seen her perform a handful of times.

    She never fails to leave you feeling inspired and emotional.

  16. Holy moley I just realised that I loved Andrea Gibson before I knew I was gay. This was sometime last year, I don’t even know I came across “the photograph,” probably hours of youtube trawling in my then unfulfilling job

    but

    “You were the first mile where my heart broke a sweat.”

    Man, that line just stuck with me, I will never forget. Connections <3

  17. I first heard of Andrea Gibson last year when i was going through some really tough stuff, lets just say she helped me through it and she didn’t even know it.

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