Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan

In the music video for ‘Sapokanikan’, Joanna Newsom saunters through the streets of New York City at dusk. The bright lights and sandwich shops and blaring sirens of the big city provide a fitting backdrop for the ballroom melodies and percussive vamps of the music. The prevailing ambiance sustains a sense of whirligig momentum, which trips back into life following the last high note of an incandescent flute.

In ‘Sapokanikan’ the camera which initially faces Newsom head-on feels compelled to match her movements, straining for a last glimpse of the sun or spinning as she turns to capture a profile shot. The song and its accompanying video, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, serve as an introduction to Divers, the fourth studio album by Newsom and the follow-up to the copious Have One on Me.

‘Sapokanikan’ is a place name, used by the Lenape tribe of indigenous people for the small seasonal village and trading post which they established on Manhattan Island, on the east bank of the Hudson River. There until the early 1600s, the Lenape – who stretched from the Delaware Bay to the Hudson River, and are also known as the Delaware Indians and the Leni Lenape – would hunt and fish or trade with other tribes and some of the early European settlers.

The Lenape spoke the Unami language, with the name ‘Manhattan’ derived from the Unami term ‘Manna-hata’ often translated as ‘island of many hills’. The footpath which the Lenape used to travel inland from Sapokanikan served as the basis for Gansevoort Street, which runs today across the breadth of the Meatpacking District.

In Joanna Newsom’s rendition, ‘Sapokanikan’ boasts a typically rich array of tail rhymes, internal rhymes, and alliteration, with varying stanzas and an assortment of compound terms. Through a diverse set of references the song elaborates a contended history of New York City, seeking to reconcile the bustling metropolis with the stories of people and places excised and forgotten along the way.

‘Sapokanikan’ by Joanna Newsom

The cause is Ozymandian.
The map of Sapokanikan
is sanded and beveled,
the land lone and leveled
by some unrecorded and powerful hand
which plays along the monument,
and drums, upon a plastic bag,
The Brave Men and Women, So Dear to God
and Famous For All of the Ages rag.

(Sing: Do you love me?
Will you remember?
The snow falls above me.
The Renderer, renders.
The Event is in the hand of God.)

Beneath a Patch of Grass,
her bones the old Dutch master hid,
while, elsewhere, Tobias and the Angel disguised
what the scholars surmised was a mother and kid
(interred with other daughters, in dirt, in other potter’s fields).
Above them,
parades mark the passing of days
through parks where pale colonnades arch
in marble and steel,
where all of the Twenty Thousand attending your foot fall
(and the Cause that they died for)
are lost in the idling birdcalls,
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence:

the text will not yield
(nor X-ray reveal, with any fluorescence)
where the Hand of the Master begins and ends.

I fell.
I tried to do well but I won’t be.
Will you tell the one that I loved
to remember, and hold me?
I call and call for the doctor,
but the snow swallows me whole,
with old Florry Walker.

The event lives only in print.

He said:
“It’s alright, and it’s all over now,” and boarded the plane,
his belt unfastened,
(The boy was known to show unusual daring—
and called a ‘boy’, this alderman
confounding Tammany Hall, in whose employ
King Tamanend himself preceded John’s fall!)

So we all raise a standard
to which the wise and honest soul may repair;
to which a hunter,
a hundred years from now,
may look, and despair, and see with wonder
the tributes we have left to rust in the park:
swearing that our hair stood on end,
to see John Purroy Mitchel depart for the Western Front,
where work might count.
All exeunt! All go out!
Await the hunter, to decipher the stone
(and what lies under, now).
The city is gone.
Look, and despair.
Look, and despair.

* * *

In antiquity, ‘Ozymandias’ was the name by which Greek sources referred to Ramesses II. The third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, Ramesses II is often regarded as the greatest ruler of the New Kingdom for the series of military campaigns he undertook in the Levant, covering the extent of modern Syria.

Ramesses succeeded in reasserting Egyptian control over Canaan, but shorn of an Attic frame of reference today the name takes on a more romantic hue. ‘Ozymandias’ is the title of the best recognised and most anthologised poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which was first published on 11 January 1818 in the London weekly The Examiner.

Several months prior to the publication of the poem, the British Museum in London had announced the acquisition of a 7.25 tonne fragment of a statute of Ramesses II. Dating from the thirteenth century BC, the statue depicts the pharaoh’s head and continues to be one of the British Museum’s signature works of Egyptian sculpture. While the statue would not arrive in London until 1821, the announcement of its purchase is believed to have inspired Shelley’s poem.

Shelley wrote ‘Ozymandias’ over the Christmas period of 1817, as he engaged in a sonnet competition with his close friend, the poet and stockbroker Horace Smith. Under the same title, Smith’s sonnet appeared in The Examiner three weeks later on 1 February.

Both poems explore the transitory nature of power set against the ravages of time. The booming voice of a once mighty ruler gives way to an eerie still, as the fragment of half-buried statue amid an expanse of desert conjures sentiments of solitude and the spectre of future wildernesses. While Smith’s sonnet makes an explicit connection with contemporary London, casting the ‘annihilation’ of a forgotten Babylon in terms of wonder and dread, Shelley more obliquely contrasts the faded lustre of dominion with the enduring qualities of art.

‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

‘Ozymandias’ by Horace Smith (1818)

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place

Incorporating phrases from both poems into her lyrics, Joanna Newsom makes a similar gesture. ‘Sapokanikan’ revitalises Smith’s comparatively remote and abandoned sonnet, positing a fundamental parity with Shelley’s work.

While Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ kept its title across subsequent collections, the popularity of his friend’s poem prompted a change from Smith. His ‘Ozymandias’ took the informative but hardly catchy title ‘On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below’. In fact it is Smith’s notion of a ‘powerful but unrecorded race’ which thematically binds the various facets of Newsom’s composition.

* * *

Gansevoort Street lies at the northwestern edge of Greenwich Village. After the Dutch at the behest of colony director Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island in 1626, the Lenape were driven out of Sapokanikan, and the area which comprises Greenwich Village today was taken over as farm land. Tobacco flourished, prompting speculation that ‘Sapokanikan’ may have been a native term for ‘tobacco field’ or ‘wild tobacco’.

Some of the land was also handed over to freed African slaves, who served as a sort of buffer between the Dutch and the indigenous tribes who remained in the area. Minetta Street stands today as a remnant of what became known as the Negroes’ Causeway, a pathway running alongside Minetta Brook which demarcated the freed slaves from the more prosperous Dutch.

When the Dutch surrendered to the English in 1664, New Amsterdam became New York. But Greenwich Village remained outside the boundaries of the fledgling city, from 1797 until 1829 serving as the site of the first prison in New York State.

Around the same time Washington Square Park, now the beating heart of Greenwich Village, became the site of a ‘potter’s field’ or burial ground. As New York suffered through yellow fever epidemics and cholera outbreaks during the first decades of the 1800s, many of the people who succumbed to disease were buried at this potter’s field. The site was closed in 1825, and Greenwich Village was soon incorporated as part of New York City. The burial ground was levelled, and turned into a parade ground which by 1871 had been formally recognised as a park. Yet the earth beneath Washington Square Park is still thought to bear host to as many as 20,000 burials.

Beyond visions of shattered statues and antique lands, Joanna Newsom begins to trace the ‘map’ of Sapokanikan. In her potted history the relics and vestiges of this levelled land begin to push up from beneath the bevelled surfaces, marbled arches, and layers of sediment.

From military parades and student demonstrations to the suffragette movement, folk gatherings, and gay rights, Washington Square Park has a long history as a site of protest which Newsom seeks to enhance through conciliation with the past. She references the Washington Square Arch with its spandrels and friezes and an inscription from George Washington which reads, ‘Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God’. She gestures towards the bust of Alexander Lyman Holley, a pioneer in the manufacture of American steel.

In her composition of place the air sounds with ragtime music, a blending of African polyrhythms with the steady beats of a march. In ‘Sapokanikan’, as Newsom stands up from her bench in the park, the footsteps of celebrated names and earnest advocates are carried by the hopes and dreams of a twenty-thousand-strong throng of the dead.

* * *

Between the ragtime rhythms and patterns of makeshift drumming, in the shadow of a burial ground stocked and then discarded by a rapidly expanding city, ‘Sapokanikan’ carves out the space for a communal plea. The lines ‘Do you love me?’ and ‘Will you remember?’ are drawn from the signature song of the 1917 musical Maytime, with music by Sigmund Romberg and lyrics by Rida Johnson Young.

Joanna Newsom transposes the sweet springtime setting of the song ‘Will You Remember?’, covering the refrain in a blanket of snow. In the musical two young lovers kept apart by differences in social class meet again years later, when the former gardener Richard with his newfound wealth is able to save his sweetheart Ottilie from bankruptcy. Time and youth have passed them by, but in the Jazz Age fate brings their grandchildren together.

Maytime proved such a success on Broadway that it was adapted for film in 1923. The romantic drama was directed by Louis J. Gasnier, and starred Ethel Shannon and Harrison Ford while featuring Clara Bow in one of her earliest performances. The finale of the film pulled out all the stops through its pioneering use of two-color Technicolor, but shorn of its songs in the silent era of moviemaking, the film version of Maytime flopped.

The film was considered lost until prints were uncovered by the New Zealand Film Archive in 2009. With support from the Library of Congress, and grants courtesy of the Save America’s Treasures programme and the Clara Bow scholar David Stenn, the surviving reels of the 1923 film version of Maytime were restored in 2011.

From the grand narratives of indigenous tribes and New York City to personal stories clasped within narrower frames, Joanna Newsom now renews her focus on the native Dutch. The lines in ‘Sapokanikan’ which refer to the ‘bones’ hidden by an ‘old Dutch master’ beneath a ‘patch of grass’ hoist into view a celebrated painting by Vincent van Gogh.

Patch of Grass hangs today in the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, a closeup of a field of grass in vibrant colour which the artist painted in Paris in 1887, freshly inspired by the Impressionists and Japanese woodblock prints. Scrabbling for funds, Van Gogh often painted over his earlier compositions, and in 2008 innovative X-ray analysis carried out by researchers at the Delft University of Technology revealed beneath the busy greens of Patch of Grass the portrait of a Dutch peasant.

The portrait was painted around two and a half years earlier in Neunen, in the months preceding The Potato Eaters when his art was still characterised by bulging features and a sombre palette. Thanks to fluorescent X-rays which successfully mapped the pigments and chemicals of the painting, the researchers in Delft in 2008 uncovered in remarkable detail the head of a peasant woman wearing a cap.

In the same vein Newsom cites a long-disputed canvas by the Italian Renaissance master Titian. A painting with the title Tobias and the Angel, depicting the Biblical scene from the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, was still being cautiously attributed to Titian when it was purchased by Nicholas I of Russia in 1850. Within a few years however the Russian emperor had sent the work off to auction, advised by his experts that it was probably inauthentic.

In the twentieth century this canvas on the popular theme of Tobias and the Angel routinely failed to find a buyer at auction. Then in 1983, its owner Alec Cobbe opted to undertake arduous and risky restorative work. The restoration of Tobias and the Angel was not completed until 1999, when it revealed an original canvas by Titian of a woman and child. The unfinished portrait had been painted over by one of his pupils to resemble the more illustrious subject matter of Tobias and the archangel Raphael, posed arm in arm carrying a giant fish.

Today the restored canvas by Titian is known as Portrait of a Lady and Her Daughter. As it was left unfinished, the painting was probably not a commissioned piece. Instead it may have depicted members of Titian’s family, perhaps even his daughter and granddaughter. Placing its worth as part of Titian’s catalogue, the professor and Venetian art expert Peter Humfrey said ‘Excepting the erotic pictures, there are no other portraits by Titian of Venetian patrician women, and certainly no other of a mother and child’.

The convoluted histories of Patch of Grass and Portrait of a Lady and Her Daughter show female subjects concealed by subsequent layers of paint. The technological advancements which helped to fill out these canvases might not be able to isolate or specify the thousands of lost voices which lie underground or hang in the air over Washington Square Park. Yet through the reanimating properties of art, in a song like ‘Sapokanikan’ some of these voices seem to cry out in chorus, encouraging us to reexamine and reinterpret settled notions of the past.

Themes of unrequited love and unrealised potential come to a head in the reference which ‘Sapokanikan’ makes to Florry Walker. In 2006 the conservator Michael Varcoe-Cocks began to restore Spring, a painting completed in 1890 by the Australian impressionist Arthur Streeton. As he worked over the canvas, Varcoe-Cocks discovered that Streeton had scratched the name ‘Florry Walker’ with a pin three times into the paint. He subsequently found the inscriptions ‘Florry is my sweetheart’ and ‘Florry/Smike’, invisible to the naked eye but discernible by microscope.

An X-ray of Spring had already revealed the traces of a female nude, painted out as Streeton furnished his pastoral scene with male bathers. Taking on the mantle of detective work, Varcoe-Cocks was able to tease the threads of a relationship between the struggling artist and the affluent Melbourne-based Walker family, whose youngest daughter was named Florence. Further inscriptions in pencil and paint suggest that Streeton was briefly infatuated with Florry, the potential subject of his art at a time when the female form was uncommon within the context of Australian landscape painting.

Differences in age and class make it unlikely that Streeton ever consummated his desire for Florry Walker. But the records leave a gap, as Streeton burned some of his letters before he died in 1943, while Florence gave away some of her own correspondence. Print throws up its hands, and the event lies somewhere in the ether.

* * *

Leaving the nineteenth century behind, Joanna Newsom lingers on the cusp of the present. In the final stanzas of ‘Sapokanikan’ she turns her attention to New York City as it was during the First World War, with an impressionistic portrayal of the life of John Purroy Mitchel.

After graduating from New York Law School and taking up practice as a private attorney, John Purroy Mitchel entered into politics in December 1906. Less than three years later he had been elected president of the board of alderman in New York, as the sole Democrat on an otherwise Republican fusion ticket. Developing a reputation as a progressive reformer as he sought to tackle the city’s transportation woes and financial profligacy, Mitchell managed to consolidate behind him those forced who opposed the powerful Tammany Hall.

The Tammanies were originally nativist societies, with the first established in 1772 in the city of Philadelphia. They were named after the Lenape chief Tamanend, whose reputation flourished in the eighteenth century as a symbol of peace and political comity. At the meeting at Shackamaxon in 1682 between Tamanend and William Penn, the chief reportedly declared that the Lenape and the English colonists would ‘live in peace as long as the waters run in the rivers and creeks and as long as the stars and moon endure’. As Hugh Brogan writes in The Penguin History of the USA:

‘Tammany was a Delaware chieftain who, traditionally, was among those who welcomed William Penn to America in 1682. During the eighteenth century the memory of this friendly Indian was kept green and he was posthumously endowed with the combined powers of Hercules, Aesculapius and Alfred the Great. During the Revolution ‘St Tammany’ societies were founded in opposition to the pro-British societies of St George. Tammany became the chosen patron saint of the Revolutionary army.’

Taking root in New York in 1789, over the course of the next century Tammany Hall came to dominate political life in the city. By advancing the position of the Irish Catholics in New York and earning the loyalty of a booming immigrant population, Tammany Hall won a base of support which allowed them to control Democratic Party nominees and other aspects of political patronage.

Appeals to the poor and effective business dealings however failed to mask the growing stench of corruption. Standing as a Republican candidate against the Tammany machine, in 1913 John Purroy Mitchel won a rare victory to become the next mayor of New York City. Only thirty-four years old when he assumed the post, Mitchel was dubbed ‘The Boy Mayor of New York’.

As mayor, Mitchel survived an assassination attempt and worked steadily to reform the New York police department, but his fiscal policies and fervent patriotism during the First World War led to a heavy defeat in 1917 when he tried for reelection. He joined the United States Air Service, and completed his training in San Diego with the rank of major. Then on the morning of 6 July 1918, on a training flight to Gerstner Field near Lake Charles, Louisiana, his plane went into a nose dive. With his seatbelt unfastened, he plunged 500 feat to his death.

Mitchel therefore never made it to the Western Front, the main theatre of warfare. Instead his body was flown back to the East Coast in the company of his wife Olive. His funeral was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, and he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in his hometown borough of The Bronx. Mitchel Field, an air force base on the Hempstead Plains of Long Island, was subsequently named in his honour, and memorial plaques were affixed at Columbia University and Central Park.

The death of John Purroy Mitchel was front-page news in the United States. The New York Tribune account furnishes ‘Sapokanikan’ with some of its most suggestive lines and keenest imagery. Headlined ‘Mitchel Killed by Fall from Aero; Safety Belt Loose’, the article notes that ‘Upon joining the aviation service he was sent to San Diego, Cal., where, after successfully passing through the cadet training, he became a full-fledged flier. He was frequently mentioned as having shown unusual daring’.

The Tribune piece adds that Mitchel was ‘reaching the finishing stages of training necessary for service at the war front’. On the moments prior to his fateful flight, the Tribune paints an intimate portrait:

‘Major Mitchel and his instructor, Lieutenant John McCaffery, went out on the grounds early this morning, and were laughing and talking about New York City politics. Lieutenant McCaffery jokingly remarked he was sorry he did not vote for Mr. Mitchel in the last election, and Major Mitchel, as he climbed into his seat, smilingly replied:
“That’s all right; it’s all over now.”
One of the mechanicians had said a few days ago:
“It makes my hair stand on end to see Major Mitchel fly; he takes so many risks and seems to think nothing of it.”‘

Mitchel reportedly chose the air service believing he could advance more rapidly there than in any other department. ‘My one wish’, he said, ‘is to go over to the Western front where work might count’. After plummeting to his death, his body was found in tall marsh grass half a mile south of Gerstner Field, his wish unrealised.

* * *

If the prospect of war emboldened John Purroy Mitchel and adds to the sense of destruction and despair which pulls in ‘Sapokanikan’ like a perpetual undercurrent, still the tangible acts of war remain distant. Instead like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith, Joanna Newsom gestures towards the long arc of civilisation. Power usurps and the past is all too readily forgotten, in a process so absolute that it can seem inevitable, as though the pages were already written.

With a sense of irony the Western Front of the First World War bounds back upon the United States, reflecting themes of Manifest Destiny. As attempts to conciliate with native chiefs like Tamanend petered out, and the fledgling United States opted instead for the policies of forced removal, the concept of Manifest Destiny was used to justify the annexation of indigenous lands and the scattering of local populations. Invoking their own sense of spiritual and cultural superiority, some of the European settlers believed that they had a divine right and a moral duty to spread west, covering the land with their own brand of civilisation.

Indigenous lands and tribes like the Lenape were sanded away at the edges as the United States expanded in scope, slowly through political turmoil and the ravages of slavery. Eventually America would stretch from sea to shining sea. John Purroy Mitchel could travel across the continent to commence a second career as an army pilot, in a sequence of events which refuse to distinguish between happenstance and the predestined.

As ‘Sapokanikan’ propels to a close, Joanna Newsom entwines phrases from the sonnets by Shelley and Smith with memorial tributes and visions brought back from the future. The marbled arches and bronzed figures ‘left to rust’ in New York City parks are faded relics in the eyes of a looming hunter.

‘Sapokanikan’ still does not share in the fatalism of ‘Ozymandias’, nor does it seek to disavow the present in the name of a rightful past. Instead the song serves to enact various points of departure, from the grand cultural shifts enforced by time and hastened by the process of colonisation, to daubs and etchings in pain and the small patches of land given over to dissenting voices. With a compositional lightness, from the swelling of celesta and bass to the twinkling of glockenspiel, Joanna Newsom stands back and bears witness.

There are connections with the rest of her catalogue. Drawing from myth, Ys dwelt on the theme of the submerged city. Far from being entombed by the song, in ‘Sapokanikan’ Greenwich Village and New York City are sustained and hoisted up, their burials laid bare in a process of restoration and recovery.