Joan Baez shares for the first time poems about her life written over decades

How helpless he was. / But I didn't notice, I didn't notice. / Him, there, in his room, / and I by his side, though over a thousand miles away. / I heard his tiny voice, but I didn't listen. / If I had listened, / I would have heard / a sweet ringing, like bells. / But how could I pay attention / to his tiny problems? / I was somewhere else, untangling / the buzzing of all those voices in my head. / Voices I didn't know yet. / Voices I didn't know yet. / Forgive me, my child .

Much of the book "When You See My Mother, Take Her Dancing" is, in perspective, a poetic effort by Joan Baez to appreciate her own life experience, even amidst fears, anxieties, and panic attacks. Psychoanalytic responses often emanate from them, as in the poem "Gold Leaf ," in which Joan Baez asserts that the men with whom she had intimate relationships seemed covered in gold leaf, perhaps because she idealized them as her father figure, but...

The men she made love to looked as if they were covered in gold leaf: “It came off when I turned over in bed,” she writes.

Of course! That's it! / All the men and boys/ I made love to/ were covered in gold leaf,/ it came off/ when I turned over in bed/ and stuck out a foot because they were making me hot.

–Has it been like this, without exception?

"I can maintain it for 48 hours," Baez says in a teleconference with La Vanguardia . "But for a real relationship, that is, a partner or a husband, I wasn't able to have an intimate relationship where the gold leaf fell and everything was fine. My foot is still gasping for air."

Read also

Evoking her childhood is also creating a portrait of her surroundings, as when she talks about her friend Lily, from a Mennonite family, who ran away and got married as soon as she turned sixteen...

Lily had black eyes and skin as white as hand soap,/ a mean father,/ a haystack,/ and four dreamy older brothers.

In kindergarten...

I like older boys and I want to touch their arms. I'm so little they won't even notice if I reach out and touch them when they're there, on the baseball diamond, trading cards.

The Daffodil's Edge... is the title of a short poem that could well refer to Dylan, the man who broke her heart: The daffodil's fierce edge/ cuts through the winter snows/ with a soft stab/ skyward.

He also dedicates one to Jimi Hendrix...: You played just before me/ on the Isle of Wight/ and somehow/ you set/ the/ stage/ ablaze (...) You erupted/ like a / magnificent / natural / disaster/ like a fucking volcano. / At Woodstock,/ you ripped apart the national anthem/ and made it your own. / There were no explosions or rockets/ or red trails in the air. / Just your guitar/ playing in the first light of dawn/ and four hundred thousand electrified souls...

Read also

–Would this be the best anti-Trump anthem right now?

–That was glorious at the time. Because people have always thought Woodstock was political, but it wasn't. It was music in a political time. And everyone there was on the same side of politics. What we're missing right now is a real anthem. So... I'm going to sing you something that would be very helpful if we reclaimed it and made it our own. It's America the Beautiful [a century-old patriotic song].

And she starts... “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies...” She sings with that new contralto voice (soprano in her youth) that she keeps in tip-top shape, like her entire physiognomy. “When I wake up, I dance before I do anything else to get moving. This morning I danced with Keb' Mo'.”