#dear lil wayne

Lauren Ireland's Dear Lil Wayne is about a lot of things: love and loneliness, fear and sadness. Obsession. Desire. Futility. Prison. Islands. Wanting to be a "rapper's girlfriend." Booze and drugs. 

But mainly it's about unrequitedness—of the fan to the celebrity, the poet to the reader and, implicitly, the lover to her object of affection/desire/obsession. In this respect it follows a long poetic tradition. Poets such as Yeats and his poems to Maude Gunn come to mind. 

These poems are also epistles, in form and literally (Ireland sent postcards with these poems on them to Lil Wayne for the 8 months he was in prison on Riker's Island--he never wrote back). Contemporarily, they are much in the vein of Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's. As an aside: it's interesting to note how the "death" of letter writing has been lamented in the wake of email but is very much alive in poetry.*

But back to Ireland and Wayne. What I think I love most is how Ireland takes all these different emotions and weaves them together. On one page will be a Gaston Bachelard quote about how “The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams.” But a couple pages later will be these lines: “Fuck that noise. Every place is a place where someone died once. The morgue of your dreams.” 

In other words, sure, you can have your dreams back, but they’ll very likely be dead, entombed in “the economy mourning, the park, the potter’s field in the kitchen.”

Also prison, where Lil Wayne is, is a kind of tomb. And an island (Riker’s), where he also was in solitary confinement. The houses and offices and island (Manhattan) Ireland writes from are tombs of a sort. Isolation is everywhere.

And uncertainty. Just look at how many times the word "guess"—a sign of uncertainty, but in some respects also giving up like when someone's hounding you about something and your only possible reply is "I guess:" "I guess I am lots of things' bitch. I guess I'm just guessing forever."

There’s also a bit of putting the beloved/Lil Wayne on a pedestal and asking him to perform magical things. Being sure that “everything mystical spring from [Lil Wayne’s] head.” Asking him to “please give me back my time.” Donne did this often in his love poems to his wife by making her basically a stand-in for god, or at least a woman as holy as the Virgin (but also Mary Magdalene in that in his poems he and Anne More had just fucked or he was thinking about how much he wanted to fuck her, how good and holy their fucking was). 

But then there's also the realization that there’s “so much mystical bullshit,” the reality of love, taking the beloved off the pedestal and being like, what the fuck!?: "Okay, we love each other. Now what."

If there’s one thing that is certain, it’s the feeling that, in the end, despite everything, no one really cares. None of it matters. "Lil Wayne, I have seen the face of god in the bathroom at Milady's. He doesn't care, either." 

I mean, if you take the line seriously no one cares. If not, it’s funny and people can still care, things can still matter. If you take it seriously but also don’t, it’s funny and sad. People care, kind of. Things matter, maybe.

TODAY IS DEAR LIL WAYNE DAY! It's the official release day of Lauren Ireland's Dear Lil Wayne! Celebrate with a copy for yourself and a playlist full of your Weezy favorites. BUT DON'T CLICK BLIND Check out a poem in Paper Or a poem in Flavorwire Or a couple in NOÖ Or a review in Heavy Feather Review Or this interview Lauren did with Brandon Holmquest NOW GET YOUR OWN DEAR LIL WAYNE, DEAR!