I say to you idols of carefully studied disillusionment
And you worshipers who find beauty in only fallen things
That the greatest Grace we can aspire to is the strength to see the wounded walk with the forgotten and pull ourselves from the screaming blood of our losses to fight on undaunted all the more
Kilcher, Jewel, “I Say to You Idols.” A Night Without Armor, HarperCollins, 1998, p. 52.
Though it’s more of an artifact of 1990s pop culture these days, Jewel’s poetry collection A Night Without Armor was a New York Times bestseller when it came out, with more than a million copies sold. While big sales of a book connected to a popular singer aren’t out of the ordinary, sales of poetry books rarely ever hit this level and if they do, they’re from well-known poets, poets who are currently making or have made a big impact on our culture, or classical bards like Homer and Virgil. Even Jewel said she had a hard time getting a publisher to print it despite being huge at the time.
If you remember A Night Without Armor, you probably remember a few things: first, its success; second, its mixed reviews, which range from praise to balanced criticism to insults*; and third, that moment with Kurt Loder.
As part of an interview on one of MTV News’ programs (I think it was their weekly show 1515), Loder sits down with Jewel to talk about the collection of poetry and then reads a line that rhymes “TV” with “casualty.” The rhyme works, except that “casualty” is the incorrect word; she meant “casualness.” She pushes back, obviously thrown off a little–and maybe it’s the first time she or anyone caught that, so she doesn’t even have an “artistic” response for it, like “Well, it’s both and here’s how …”–and Loder moves on with the interview. Later on, he asks her about her writing process. Jewel says that she writes everything by hand and her dyslexia made it hard for her to type. When it was time to put the manuscript together for A Night Without Armor, she had to rewrite the poems by hand legibly enough for them to be transcribed, which is a lot of work.
Loder’s response? ”That explains casualty.”
Jewel, keeping her composure, says, “That probably does. You smartass for pointing that out. Next topic.”
In a Stereogum interview yeas later, Jewel said she got pissed off in that moment because of the way he was dragging her; she didn’t have a formal education and he was using that moment to laugh at that. In 2022, Loder said that in retrospect, it was “a shitty thing to do” and if he had to do it over, definitely wouldn’t.
Beyond Pieces of You, I don’t think I gave Jewel much thought (and even then didn’t listen to the album very often beyond the songs that became the singles). I remember “Foolish Games” being on the Batman and Robin soundtrack and did listen to at least a few of the songs on her second album, Spirit, but never read her poetry. At that point, I was more than halfway through college and recreational reading was pretty rare, especially during the school year. I always had a pile of assigned books or articles for my college classes, and whenever I did read something casually, it was comic books or a Star Trek novel. Deliberately seeking poetry, no matter who wrote it, and it certainly was the furthest thing from my mind when my writing professor played the video for Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” at the beginning of class one day.
He’d shared things with us before and while he never assigned anything to go along with them, he always made a clear connection between the piece and the idea that: A) you can find something interesting to ready any place any day, and B) there are lots of unlikely sources of inspiration out there. But this was confusing. Why was he playing a video that was in heavy rotation on VH-1? When the video finished, he took the tape out of the classroom VCR and said, “She reminded me of Jewel.”
The tone was amused condescension, and I heard a few people laugh. I guess they knew something I didn’t? Probably. After all, this was one of those professors who had a healthy following and if they’d all had him before, they knew why that was funny. This was my first class with him and like I said, I hadn’t read any of Jewel’s poetry. But I got the impression that it was of lower quality, beneath him, and it should be something we all sneered at. It didn’t matter that she was only a few years older than we were and writing the way that people our age might write–we were supposed to be better.
I know that a writing professor being pretentious is not the most shocking thing in the world, but it was as misogynist as Kurt Loder’s sneering on MTV. Much of our culture, especially male culture, was still entranced in the “culture of irony” and the milieu of being hyper critical. Sincerity, earnestness, and vulnerability was the territory of teenage girls and therefore was stupid. While there was certainly poetry and pop music out there that was so sincere that it was beyond saccharine, liking it didn’t make you any less intellgient, and as I head into my second decade of teaching, I wonder why we never took a moment to investigate Jewel’s poetry. Why not take a moment to ask the class, “This person is your age and has just sold a ton of copies of this poetry. Where is she drawing inspiration from? What is her appeal? What does she do well? What can be improved? How would you approach these topics?” We could have even taken a few of those poems and “workshopped” them if we wanted to be critical, maybe even compare her poetry to Tupac’s, which was also getting attention at the time. Instead, we got snide remarks before moving on to the “literary” darling of the moment.
It makes me wonder if majoring in creative writing was a dumb thing to do because the way so much was geared toward making us write “literary” stuff stilted my growth as a writer. Okay, that’s too simple a way of thinking about it and after 25 years I should let go of my shit, but I had such a hard time writing in those classes. I knew how to write, but didn’t know what kind of voice I wanted to be or have, and only seemed to learn what voice I should try to have so I could to measure up to the standards of pretentious writing professors. After all, everyone else admired those men.
I’d like to say that I “proved all of them wrong” and give everyone a “look where I am now” moment, but I never got to be a capital W writer and went down the “those who can’t, teach” path. I don’t share my writing very often (yes, I realize the irony that I have been blogging and podcasting for more than a decade). And more and more, I avoid those days of college, especially the memories of feeling like the dumbest person in the room.
I mean, I was this … ordniary, normal (which I know is a loaded word and inappropriate term nowadays, but it’s the only word I can think of) guy who both knew and yet did not know himself. The “knowing myself” was the pop culture side, the kid who dubbed The Breakfast Club from the video store copy so he didn’t have to keep renting it, the guy who wanted to create a humorous voice through essays because that’s what he was good at. But I thought I was supposed to find something deeper about me and write about pain or something. Unfortunately, not having a tragedy to mine for material is not the model to follow in a college creative writing program if you want to impress pretentious college professors who do not realize what it means to be a teenager.
I found A Night Without Armor at my public library a few months ago while I was doing my usual roaming around the stacks and looking for something interesting to take home. I wasn’t surprised it was there, but was surprised that I’d pretty much forgotten it existed. So I checked it out. At 46, I’m probably getting close to the same age as that writing professor; in theory, I am not the type of person who is supposed to find anything profound in the writing of teenagers. On the other hand, I’m around them all day and read a lot of their writing. So … why not?
The verdict? It’s not bad, and I’m not saying that in a condescending tone. Since I knew the book as a punchline for so long, I was expecting something laughable or at least amateurish**, but it wasn’t. Some of it, yes, does read like a high school or college lit mag, but considering the age where she first wrote most of it, that makes sense. But when she gets very autobiographical–poems about performing, about where she grew up, about her parents–the poetry is interesting because Jewel is a good storyteller. Additionally, when she gets into issues like body image and sexuality, she has a sense of empathy and compassion toward her poems’ subjects, which are in many cases teenage girls. There is a sense of her having lived all of it and very recently that wouldn’t resonate with her audience if she were middle-aged.
I suppose that I’m not giving expert literary criticism here and the fact that her book of poetry hasn’t become a rite of passage for teenage writers tells you that it wasn’t worth the attention it got, but in the end, I still say Jewel was never given a fair chance. It’s brave to be a young female singer-songwriter and also a poet, especially when sneering men in ivory towers delight in tearing others down and you wind up just another casualty.
* The same is true for Pieces of You, her debut album that was released in February 1995 and took more than a year to gain traction (“Who Will Save Your Soul”, its first single, would come out in June of 1996 and peak at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 that August). Not that rock critics aren’t often uppity assholes about music (if they weren’t, Pitchfork would have never existed), but some of the reviews of the album were downright nasty.
** I’m not one to judge. I wrote the shittiest poetry known to man when I was in high school and college. No, really. I once compared a relationship with an ex-girlfriend to the act of vomiting. Jewel could have typed qwerty fifty times and it would have been better than anything I ever wrote.
Pop Culture Affidavit 