Joan Baez is an icon of 1960s American folk music and a civil rights activist. She sang at the March on Washington in 1963, protested with Cesar Chavez in California, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and performed at Woodstock in 1969.
In her six-decade-long career, she has put out more than 30 albums and inspired many artists, including The Beatles and Lana Del Rey. She retired from touring in 2019, then turned to painting, drawing, and publishing books.
Now she’s out with When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance: Poems. She wrote the collection of poems in the 1990s, while processing child abuse.
The book title is also the title of one of the poems, which describes Baez’s mother as a young woman. The musician and writer tells KCRW that her mom loved classical music, particularly the work of Jussi Björling, a Swedish tenor.
“[The poem is] the story of my mom meeting Björling at this imaginary dance. And my hand took off writing this thing. So it's a fantasy, but it's coming out of real-life feelings of my mom [for Björling], and we imagine in the poem that the feelings were reciprocal.”
“When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance: Poems” is the title of Joan Baez’s new book and the title of a poem in it. Credit: David Gahr.
Baez’s father, Albert, was a physicist and a professor, best known for his contributions to X-ray technology. At home, however, he had trouble connecting with the rest of the arts-driven family.
At mid-life, Baez recovered memories of abuse from him and others, spanning more than six years. She says it’s important to understand what abuse does to a child’s mind and how long it can take to address it.
“It took me till I was 50 to even admit there was something down there that was giving me phobias and insomnia, and all the things that are listed in the poetry book.”
“Why was that all happening? Why was that all happening?” She asked herself. “And then I thought: Okay, it's down in there somewhere, let me see if I can go down and find it and deal with it, which is what I did. And it took years.”
She continues, “They came very quickly for a number of years. And because they came in the form of multiple personalities, it was like my own family.”
Baez herself was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, which can stem from childhood trauma.
Many of the poems in When You See My Mother were written by “the entities,” a term Baez uses to describe the other personalities. That includes a 12-year-old German boy whose parents survived the Holocaust. A few personalities are still present, Baez says, but are now under control.
Another poem in the book is titled “Judy,” and it’s based on a backstage moment between Baez and longtime folk musician and friend Judy Collins. In the piece, Baez is apologizing for not being there enough for Collins, who had lost her son Clark, 33, by suicide in 1992.
Now, Baez says she’s focused on creating intimacy among her friends. “Friends that were hard for me to make back then. I have lots of very good friends now and I think that's something I couldn't have had years ago. But I do have now and I'm grateful for it.”
This form of intimacy is different from romantic feelings, she points out. “In that sense, I do not have intimacy at the moment. But I do have it with friends with whom I'm closer than I ever was in the past.”
“People are going to expect more political activism, etc., out of me in a poetry book, and it simply isn't there,” says Joan Baez. Credit: Dana Tynan.
Baez points out that people would expect her to write about political activism in the poems — “and it simply isn’t there.”
Still, she says she wants to be on the college campuses where Gaza protests have been recently occurring. “I'm sympathetic with all that. And I think: Well, wait a minute, I can't do that, I'm not a student. I don't even know if I would be welcome. So I'm itching to be there and knowing that at the moment, it's not where I need to be, for a lot of reasons.”
She continues, “I think sometimes coming onto the campus when you’re [an] ‘outside agitator’ does more damage to them than good. I think with their ardent support of themselves as students, and that it is their campus, and that they have a right to be doing what they're doing on their campus, I think that probably needs to be respected.”
Baez says these student protestors are brave, but she wishes they had been trained in nonviolence. “And if they were organized, [Martin Luther] King would have organized them, you don't let the police get the better of you by you shouting at them. That's all I can say.”
If the student demonstrators stand their ground, Baez says some of their demands might possibly get fulfilled. “I'm all in favor of compromise. Gandhi said, ‘There's nothing wrong with compromise as long as you don't compromise your soul.’ So if the students can find ways to speak, keep things open, and get at least a portion of what it is they want — you get a portion, and then you keep fighting for the next chunk or the next chunk.”
She continues, “First of all, they've already awakened a whole portion of this society, which really wasn't paying any attention, except in the most superficial way. So in a way, their job is already partly done. And then now hopefully, they can stay on it until they get more substantial gains.”