Judy Collins, SOMETIMES IT'S HEAVEN: Poems of Love, Loss, and Redemption
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[0:44]Judy Collins is the author of Sometimes a Seven, Poems of Love, Loss, and Redemption.
[0:50]Judy Collins has long-inspired audiences with sublime vocals, boldly vulnerable songwriting,
[0:55]personal life triumphs, and a firm commitment to social activism.
[0:59]In the 1960s, she evoked both the idealism and steely determination of a generation
[1:03]united against social and environmental injustices.
[1:07]Five decades later, her luminescent presence shines brightly as new generations bask in the
[1:12]glow of her iconic 55 album body of work, and heat inspiration from her spiritual discipline
[1:19]to thrive in the music industry for half a century.
[1:23]The award-winning singer-songwriter is esteemed for her imaginative interpretations of traditional
[1:27]and contemporary folk standards, and her own poetically poignant original compositions.
[1:32]Her stunning rendition of Joni Mitchell's both sides now, from her landmark 1967 album
[1:37]Wild Flowers, has been entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
[1:41]Judy's dreamy and sweetly intimate version of Send in the Clowns, a ballad written
[1:45]by Steven Sondheim for the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, one song of the year
[1:49]at the 1975 Grammy Awards.
[1:51]She has garnered several top ten hits, gold and platinum-selling records.
[1:56]Recently, contemporary and classic artists such as Rufus Wainwright, Sean Colvin,
[2:00]Dolly Parton, Joan Baez, and Leonard Cohen honored her legacy with the album born to
[2:05]the breed, a tribute to Judy Collins.
[2:08]Welcome, Judy.
[2:09]Thank you so much for coming on totally booked with Zibi to talk about, sometimes it's
[2:13]heaven poems of love, loss, and redemption.
[2:16]Congratulations.
[2:17]Thank you.
[2:18]You touched on the most sort of emotional themes in this book.
[2:23]I feel like I really got to know you.
[2:25]They were beautiful.
[2:26]You go from social activism to your own loss to love and lust.
[2:30]I mean, you really run the commitment here of a human lifespan and emotions.
[2:36]Why don't you tell listeners what inspired this latest collection and how you said about
[2:41]writing it?
[2:42]Well, it was interesting, my husband, who unfortunately died in late December last year,
[2:51]in 2017, so this book is really devoted, dedicated to him.
[2:57]In 2017, I was starting my year of writing, which I always do.
[3:02]I always get a new notebook out and I start trying to turn poems or writing into songs.
[3:11]That's really the object.
[3:14]So I said to him one day, I said, well, I'll start doing my 90 and 90 days and he said,
[3:20]well, why don't you do 365 one a day and I said, well, why not?
[3:27]That's quite a challenge and I, so I started and I actually did 365 poems in 365 days.
[3:37]So when I was finished, I sat around for a while and made some, I turned a few of them
[3:43]into songs, which came out on Spellbound, which was a couple of years ago.
[3:51]The first album of all my own songs and then my agent said, well, you have all these poems
[3:57]sitting around, why don't we publish them?
[4:00]And I took the name of the book, sometimes it's heaven from one of the poems, exactly,
[4:07]which is sort of what you do.
[4:08]You kind of cruise over what you've written and figure out how you can use some of it
[4:14]to express what the book is about.
[4:17]And so we found a, I had another book do, I had finished cravings for one of the other
[4:26]publishers and they didn't want to do a book of poetry.
[4:29]So we found Macmill, Andrew's, Andrew's, Macmill, wonderful group of publishers.
[4:39]And they decided, they usually don't put a picture on the cover, they usually put birds
[4:45]or colors or something, you know, they're all very beautiful.
[4:49]But towards the end of the editing situation, I found this, my, my team and I found this
[4:58]picture of me at 13, I should show it to you, it's, I was 13, oh, you got it too.
[5:07]I was 13 in my dress in which I was playing Mozart with the Symphony Orchestra for my
[5:14]teachers and Tony Abrico's orchestra in Denver.
[5:18]And so they thought, oh, that looks great, I think we'll use it, which was a surprise.
[5:23]And I thought, I love it, I think it's a great, for me it's a great cover picture.
[5:30]It is, I love it, I absolutely love it and can't believe you were only 13 in that picture.
[5:35]Oh my gosh.
[5:36]We grow up, grown up for my age, I'm sure.
[5:41]Do you mind if I maybe read a couple of the poems and you can talk about them?
[5:45]Is that okay?
[5:46]Or is it absolutely right?
[5:48]This is at the end of the poem called Clark about your late son.
[5:53]And I'm so sorry for your loss and love the way you wrote about him and honored his memory
[5:58]and all of that.
[6:00]He wrote, some of the bottles always blew up in the closet, what a mess, I picked Clark
[6:06]up and swept the glass off the floor and went to work.
[6:09]We had a husky named Smokey and by the time I left for my big career, I was divorced
[6:13]from my starter husband and fighting to have custody of my beautiful boy, which eventually
[6:18]I won.
[6:19]We lived happily ever after until his death by his own hand in 1992.
[6:23]He died as had his paternal grandfather, Gary Taylor, sometime in 1948, in a car in a garage
[6:30]with the motor running, rest in peace, my beautiful boy.
[6:36]Well, you know, it's always a surprise.
[6:39]I don't, although I think he was seven years sober when he decided to take his life,
[6:46]when he decided to drink.
[6:49]And I was shocked and devastated, but it's not, you know, if somebody is an addict and
[6:58]they're, they're not working out sobriety with the kind of help and he had great help.
[7:05]He was at Hazelton in Minnesota, and he was in, he was in the aftercare program, really,
[7:15]but he'd been sober for a long time.
[7:17]Seven years is a good start, and he wasn't done apparently.
[7:23]And so when he took his life, it was interesting, I was here.
[7:29]It was the day that my husband, Lewis, who was a brilliant designer, industrial designer,
[7:37]was given the work of designing the Korean memorial in Washington, D.C. on the mall.
[7:47]And he was in Washington, and my, one of my brothers called me and called him, and we
[7:53]met in Minnesota for the funeral.
[7:57]It was, it was a strange kind of synchronicity, I suppose, but it was the hardest thing I ever did.
[8:04]And one of my friends, Joan Rivers was, was a friend of ours, and she called me.
[8:11]I remember standing in this hallway outside my studio a few days after the funeral, and I got a call
[8:18]from Joan, and she was, she was in the place where she worked so much, I forget what it's called,
[8:25]and she was getting ready to go on stage. And she called me, and she said, you cannot cancel
[8:34]your shows. Her husband had just killed himself, and she was in the middle, and a lot of women in
[8:41]New York gathered around me and helped me to get through this. It's not the same that it's a
[8:49]similar thing to what's happened to me was Louis's death in December of last year, and he was,
[8:56]he was discovered to have an undiagnosed cancer, and it had been going on for a long time.
[9:04]And anyway, Joan said you can't cancel your shows, and I had started to do this in 1992,
[9:14]but I called my team, and I said, okay, I have to listen to Joan Rivers. She knows what she's
[9:20]talking about, and I went out, I continued, I put everything back on the boards, and my mother came
[9:29]out with me, my sister came out with me, was one of her kids, little tiny one, and Louis came out
[9:36]with me, and I managed to do it. And I do think I learned a lot from it. I learned, well, I learned
[9:45]that first of all, you have to be with people you love doing something you love. So that combination
[9:51]was enormously helpful for me, and it fed that poem. So, you know,
[10:00]I'm glad I had him.
[10:01]I mean, I feel the same way about Lewis.
[10:02]I had 46 years with him.
[10:05]And I had 33 years with my son.
[10:08]And sometimes, I mean, I've heard a lot of people talk
[10:11]who didn't have the kind of time that I had
[10:14]was either my son or my husband.
[10:16]So it's sort of the luck of the draw.
[10:19]And those years that we have was people who go
[10:24]by whatever mode they have to leave on.
[10:29]I mean, none of us are going to stay here.
[10:32]We're all supposed to leave.
[10:33]That's the way that it's set up.
[10:36]How and when and where.
[10:38]Well, that's up to higher power and forces
[10:41]that we don't know anything about.
[10:44]So does it make you afraid of your own death?
[10:46]Or do you feel like at peace about him?
[10:48]No, first of all, I'm 86, and I'm actually 27.
[10:53]I mean, I have a very Buddhist attitude
[10:58]about all of this.
[11:00]And one of my friends, and where are these books?
[11:04]I wonder what happened to them.
[11:05]She sent me two wonderful books about the deaths
[11:08]of the deaths of many, many, many great Buddhist teachers
[11:13]and how they leave the planet and how they do it
[11:17]in such a kind and loving way.
[11:20]And they tell their followers not to be hysterical
[11:24]and not to weep and cry and pull their hair out
[11:28]and nash their teeth.
[11:29]And they just say, go about your business
[11:33]and do what you have to do because this is a normal process.
[11:39]This is not something that was suddenly made up just for you.
[11:43]The matter of law.
[11:45]So I fortunately have been a devotee of Yogananda for decades.
[11:54]And that came from my teacher, Antonio Brico.
[11:56]I'm not sure I wrote a poem about her in this book.
[12:00]I'm not sure, but anyway, eventually, I will, of course.
[12:04]But I was a student of hers for decades
[12:07]and played with her orchestra, which
[12:09]shows on the cover of this book.
[12:12]But also, I suppose that's a poem to her in a way, the picture.
[12:17]But she was, I studied it with her for years.
[12:22]And then when she and I realized that I was going
[12:28]to make a movie out of her life, which I did, which
[12:31]was nominated for an Academy Award, by the way, in 1975.
[12:37]And while we were making the film,
[12:41]I was in her studio in which I'd spent many years.
[12:45]And I saw this little portrait of Yogananda,
[12:50]a bearded master, some kind of sin person.
[12:54]And I said, how did that get there?
[12:57]And then I heard this incredible story about her life
[13:01]and how after she had been told by every big conductor
[13:06]in the United States that she could never, and other places,
[13:09]that she could never become a conductor
[13:11]because she was a woman.
[13:13]And she found Yogananda in New York in probably 90.
[13:21]Well, let's see.
[13:22]She conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1929,
[13:27]and she was 27.
[13:29]So she had already met Yogananda in New York.
[13:31]And he had said to her, why do you
[13:33]don't let people tell you what you can do?
[13:36]I mean, of course, you can be a conductor.
[13:38]And he helped to send her to Berlin.
[13:41]And as I said, her first gig was the Berlin Philharmonic
[13:45]when she was 27, and she became the toast of the town.
[13:48]She conducted everything, including the New York Philharmonic.
[13:53]So she was way ahead of her time.
[13:55]Wow.
[13:56]Can I read another poem?
[13:58]Of course, I'll read it in your choices.
[14:00]Oh, OK.
[14:01]I have a bunch, so how can I even pick?
[14:04]Well, I keep going to the ones about loss.
[14:07]So I'll just read this one.
[14:08]But then I promise I'll skip to something else.
[14:11]Oh, actually, this was also so interesting.
[14:13]What do you want?
[14:14]Whatever I want, I know.
[14:15]I'm drawn to loss as well.
[14:17]Well, this is called in the present.
[14:19]In the present, all as well, your death did not occur today.
[14:22]The flowers and the wishing well are lovely in the light of May.
[14:26]Tomorrow has no power, no sway.
[14:28]What happens then is not today.
[14:31]The winter day you took your life does not confront this sunny
[14:34]now when all as well makes one more bow and lifts a glass
[14:38]to this is how, to get through mourning your last breath
[14:41]and stay in time that is not death, that somewhere in the past
[14:44]resides, I know not where, and take no sides.
[14:48]I'll stay here where they know my name, where shadows
[14:50]have no one to blame, where memories slick with residue
[14:54]do not take on a darker hue.
[14:56]The sun shines on in spite of death, in spite of time,
[15:00]in spite of you, I'll stay in now where no one knows
[15:03]how desolate the present grows.
[15:07]Oh boy, that's so good.
[15:09]You broke that, you broke that, oh my gosh.
[15:14]Yeah, you don't know what you're writing.
[15:16]I mean, I find that this, you know, there
[15:19]used to be this idea of freehand writing and whatever happens.
[15:23]But it is part of your creative process.
[15:27]Whatever is coming out that day is what's
[15:30]going to go on the page.
[15:32]And loss, it's terrible.
[15:35]And of course, I was surrounded by these wonderful women,
[15:40]including Anderson Carter, his mother, Anderson's mother.
[15:45]Anderson Cooper.
[15:46]Gloria Vanderbilt.
[15:47]Gloria Gloria had lost a son.
[15:50]And I met a woman who wrote a book called My Son, My Son.
[15:56]I responded to wrote a great book.
[15:58]There were only two books that I found about suicide in 1992.
[16:03]There really was nothing.
[16:05]There was a poetry collection called The Winter of Silence,
[16:12]I think.
[16:13]And there was Alverez's book, Book About Sylvia Pap,
[16:18]Plath's Death, which is a very depressing book.
[16:22]Mostly because he doesn't say anything
[16:24]about positive thoughts of this.
[16:28]And but I found Iris Bolton's book.
[16:32]She has had and is the president emeritus
[16:37]of a mental health organization called The Link in Atlanta.
[16:44]And she's now retired.
[16:45]But her son, who was 19, took his life.
[16:49]And she wrote this book called My Son, My Son.
[16:52]And of course, I mean, it's a hard thing
[16:55]to be a person who teaches mental health
[17:00]and whose son dies of suicide.
[17:02]So first of all, it was a wonderful book,
[17:05]full of positive ideas and positive thoughts.
[17:09]And it just took me by surprise.
[17:12]It was so wonderful.
[17:13]It was so, she's still a friend of mine.
[17:15]And an amazing person.
[17:19]And I think her book probably opened up this territory.
[17:23]And now I don't know.
[17:24]You go to a library, you go to a bookstore,
[17:26]you see a whole wall of books about death, about suicide,
[17:32]about loss, about people talking about all kinds of sorrows
[17:37]that they've had that people didn't normally
[17:40]talk about, except perhaps illusively in poetry.
[17:44]And a lot of these books are not elusive to beat the band.
[17:49]They're much more direct and open and understanding.
[17:54]Also, there is no, what is it called?
[17:59]There is no closure.
[18:02]Forget it.
[18:04]It is in part of your life.
[18:06]It's going to hurt.
[18:07]It's going to be there.
[18:08]It's going to come up when things are happy, when things are sad,
[18:13]when you go to a funeral, when you go to a wedding.
[18:16]I mean, it all becomes a part of the fabric of your life.
[18:20]And this is human.
[18:22]It's not just me, it's from the beginning of time
[18:26]in the Garden of Eden.
[18:28]It was going on, the two brothers, one of them
[18:31]killed the other.
[18:32]I think it's so throughout the Bible,
[18:34]you find these stories.
[18:35]And they all end up death because that's
[18:38]part of the cycle of life.
[18:41]Well, in the book, in addition to loss, which I focused on a lot
[18:45]here because it just moved me so much.
[18:47]And oh my gosh, your work, you write about the many other
[18:51]notables that you've gotten to know over the years.
[18:54]And I found myself going really interested
[18:57]in your perceptions on fame itself
[18:59]and how you've watched it sort of hit yourself, yes.
[19:03]But also all these other people in your orbit come and go,
[19:06]come and go.
[19:07]What do you think about that?
[19:09]Well, it's interesting to have friends of all kinds.
[19:12]I live in New York.
[19:13]And I have friends who do every sort of job you
[19:17]could think of.
[19:18]Some are famous, some are not.
[19:20]And having working on friendships, when I came to New York,
[19:25]it was in 1963.
[19:27]And I had made a suicide attempt when I was 14.
[19:30]Thank God I didn't succeed.
[19:32]I think it would have destroyed my parents.
[19:34]I know it would.
[19:36]And I did it in a kind of moment of anger at my father
[19:42]because he wanted me to play a very difficult piece
[19:45]of music, La Campa Niella, by list.
[19:47]No, was at least, yeah, I'd had to be list.
[19:49]He's the difficult one, the most difficult one,
[19:52]or one of the most difficult.
[19:54]And it was a very hard piece.
[19:55]I still think it's a train wreck, this piece of music.
[20:00]And, uh, Rico had given it to me to work on, and I was working on it, and he wanted me to play it at a public event, a big public event. He was a musician. He was a star in Denver.
[20:14]He was on the radio every day. He was a big performer in various settings in Denver. And so he wanted to show me off really. I wasn't having any of it. And so I took 100 pills.
[20:29]And then I didn't die because that's the way life is. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. And I quickly, my father wrote me a very beautiful letter. He said you can't do that. That's what parents do. You know, there's no way you can do this.
[20:48]You have a very impressive background already at 14. And you better get used to the fact that you're going to have to work like a maniac, the rest of your life, which I have at what you do because you have some kind of thing going on here, which people like, and which you'll have to work on because that's the only way you can make it mature.
[21:13]And so the life of an artist is what I've been given. And that means lots of work and lots of travel. You know, it's an illusion that people have about creativity. They think that they can just be creative and go out and start to make a living.
[21:28]And they forget that they have to market themselves.
[21:32]And that you become an artist and then it's just full of no way. You work, you produce, you promote, you go out here, you go out there, you have to deal with dealers if you're a painter, you have to deal with publishers if you're a writer, you have to deal with the music business if you're a musician.
[21:54]Because people think this comes out of the air and it just takes care of itself and you don't have to promote it and so on.
[22:02]So I ran into the suicide idea, full force. And then when I got to New York, I found, well, I was the drinking. I am a recovering alcoholic for, I've been sober for 47 years, exactly the time I've been married.
[22:21]I've been with Lewis. I was, we lived in sin for 18 years and then we got married 27. So I forgive you.
[22:32]You can be my personal guru. Yes, of course. Happy to take that role.
[22:38]As good as don't make you regret anything or, or, you know, renew your vows or anything like that.
[22:46]My goodness.
[22:47]You also had one moment in the book where you were standing on a back porch in a, with a gentleman and you hear this loud scream and you don't know what it is.
[23:00]And here, right here, it's in, it's Hockney in the mountains. Oh, David Hockney, not just a gentleman. Okay. Well, can I read this last one? Do you mind?
[23:08]Yes. Okay. Last one. Hockney in the mountains. It was midnight and the party was over. Our host was tall and rugged.
[23:14]Colorado man, senior president of the foundation. David Hockney and I were honorary guest at the party brought into talk and raised money for someone or something. We both believed in.
[23:23]We were staying at a fancy upscale condo near the Aspen Alps. I was pretty drunk and David and I went out on the Pine balcony to smell the wood smoke and taken the sharp crisp mountain air.
[23:34]The summer night was cold and we were giddy standing there looking out at Ajax when a heart stopping blood curdling scream split the air and struck us like knives to the heart.
[23:44]I said someone is having glorious sex. David said someone is being murdered. We debated for a while and then had another drink in the resuming quiet of the mountain air.
[23:52]I stumbled back into the room. Our host called the man at the front desk who said there was nothing they could do about noise in the mountains. Everybody screamed sometimes.
[24:00]The air was still again as though blood had poured out of a wound and cauterized in the freezing air. David went back to his room. I passed out and woke to the morning paper.
[24:08]The scream we had heard was that of a famous skier who had been stabbed to death by his jealous lover in their little cabin on the next mountain side so hard to separate the screams of pleasure from the screams of death.
[24:20]Yeah, what a what a moment that was it was spider very famous skier and the woman who killed him.
[24:29]She never went to jail for this. She was married to a big famous singer Claudette. Her name was Claudette something or other.
[24:39]She had a long series of trials or issues were but she never went to jail for it. It's interesting. It was probably manslaughter because probably she was out of her mind. She was probably drinking.
[24:53]She was probably both they were probably stoned which it is no excuse by the way. I think many of these things happened under the reign of alcohol and drugs.
[25:06]But it was boy the whole experience got me. I don't know. Somebody know some friend of mine knows David Hockney. I knew him then but I have not been.
[25:19]I haven't spent time with him since then. It was an unusual remarkable event.
[25:26]But when something like this happens and you're a writer of any kind you're bound to write on it. My manager says I should turn it into a movie. Well, maybe I will. I have a lot of time.
[25:42]What do you want to do next? Like how do you feel and how do you feel embarking on new projects without your husband to bounce ideas off of does it make it harder?
[25:52]Well, he's definitely with me. I was practicing last night and I had put one of our wonderful photographs together. I don't remember who the photographer is but it's so wonderful.
[26:05]And I just kept staring at him and thinking, I've been so fortunate and he's around. He's here. Well, I have to say I'm a little upset that I haven't had as many dreams as I would like.
[26:18]I have a lot of presence of him with among my friends because we had a very large.
[26:27]Coterie of friends and we and I have always worked hard on French if I was going to connect the dots from my therapist whom I started seeing in 63 when I got to New York because I needed to stop. I needed to address my drinking, which I didn't was him, but I did talk a lot about the suicide attempt.
[26:49]And then I started the process that has led me to where I am today, which is that I started writing. I was in.
[26:58]I was insisted that I write my dreams down and I'm a I always had been a very.
[27:07]A large dreamer. I dreamt every single night of my life. When I was a child, I was growing up with, of course, my father was blind, incredibly successful, wonderfully bright.
[27:21]I was, I did a show the other night at the Library of Congress where my where my archives are, but my father got everything he needed from the Library of Congress.
[27:34]They had a whole section always they have of Braille books, you know copies of everything from Dickens right down to the latest thriller.
[27:45]And so he always had his Braille books and he had the recordings of all the shows that came to him from the Library of Congress and talking books so that we would hear Shakespeare read by all the great English speaking actors.
[28:00]So what am I telling oh yes well.
[28:03]So I was saying any projects you're excited to work on coming up.
[28:08]My dreams when I was growing up until I was.
[28:13]2022 worked in black and white.
[28:18]And I'm sure it was because my father was blind.
[28:22]I had a big accident ski accident in 1961.
[28:27]And they had me in the hospital. I was on dimmer all every four hours the way they used to do it.
[28:34]And I was there for a couple of weeks and when they switched off the dimmer all and put me on another painkiller that night my dreams burst into color.
[28:44]It was very exciting. It was like, you know, it was like the Tonys.
[28:49]It was really exciting.
[28:52]And after that I've always dreamed in color.
[28:55]But the dreams have slowed down and I'm not sure why.
[29:02]Because I felt always that that was going to be a lifetime thing that I was always going to dream.
[29:08]Anyway, I sort of feel left in the dark a little bit because I'm not having as many dreams as a little bit.
[29:16]But on the other hand I have a whole life full of pictures and experiences and years and years and years of doing wonderful things with him.
[29:27]And he was very much a part of my work because he had always was suggesting things working on things observing things being at the shows making sure that I remembered everything that my singing teacher told me to do.
[29:43]And he studied with my singing teacher was Max.
[29:46]Now I also am faced with not only another bundle of my own archives after 20 years, but I'm having to think about and I have people who can help me with this that we need to do to get his
[30:00]sarcasm somewhere because he's a big deal, you know, he designed the Korean memorial
[30:07]on the mall in Washington, which is a big, you know, belongs to the country, belongs to the world,
[30:12]it belongs to the, to the Koreans. Yes. And to the world. And so his archives have to be placed
[30:20]somewhere where somebody, people will want to come and know about Lewis Nelson, what he did.
[30:26]Amazing. Judy, thank you so much. I loved your collection. I loved our conversation. And I
[30:33]really am wishing you all the best. So thank you so much. Thank you. God bless you. And thanks for
[30:37]reading those. That was, I haven't heard that before. So I feel very much. Oh, thank you for my
[30:44]dear. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Have a beautiful day. You too. Bye bye. Thank you for
[30:51]listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show,
[30:58]tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and spread the word. Thanks so
[31:04]so much. Go and buy the books.