photograph courtesy valerie june hockett
About a decade ago, friends took me to a coffee shop to hear local musicians perform at a fundraiser. I don’t remember the place, but I don’t think it’s around anymore. Customers were painting one wall of the shop. I can’t recall everyone who performed that night, but Grace Askew, who would later gain fame on The Voice, was one. So was Valerie June Hockett, who performs as Valerie June. Reader, I was mesmerized. Hockett’s voice is powerful and unique, oscillating between joy and sorrow; her lyrics simultaneously evoke the cosmopolitan and the countryside. She praises the spirit, but not at the expense of the body, walking a narrative tightrope.
“Parting Words” from Mountain of Rose Quartz, to me, ranks as one of the most heart-achingly beautiful songs by an artist who ever called Memphis home. Her more recent “Love You Once Made” is equally iconic. And frankly, at the risk of revealing myself as the superfan I am, the “Memphis artist” qualifier is unnecessary.
Though some of Hockett’s raw emotional power is owed to her delivery and her haunting, playful, singular voice — Miles Davis’ famous quote about the note and the … let’s say “mother” who plays it — is relevant here. Her skill with words alone is not to be discounted. She is a poet, and has been for longer than it took her to claim the title, but the release of her debut poetry collection, Maps for the Modern World (Andrews McMeel Publishing), makes that fact official and indisputable.
From Earth to the Astral Plane
Born at Jackson General and spending her formative years in rural Humboldt, Tennessee, Hockett moved to Memphis when she was 18. “I fell in love and I just followed my heart right there,” she says. It would be years before she seriously considered poetry as a creative outlet, but she knew she wanted to make art. “I always wanted to sing. I knew I always wanted to do that,” Hockett says.
She made a career for herself, working her way up from open mic nights at the Java Cabana coffee shop to bigger stages. She also sold paintings at the Cooper-Young Festival and elsewhere during lean times, honing the skills she would eventually put to use in Maps for the Modern World, where an illustration stands alongside each poem.
Hockett was one of the performers in Craig Brewer’s $5 Cover miniseries for MTV, and she eventually recorded two best-selling albums, Pushin’ Against a Stone (2012) and The Order of Time (2017). Through all of her work, she hopes to promote peace, mindfulness, and healing. “What I didn’t know was how to articulate it and express it to people other than in musical time,” Hockett says. “I also didn’t have the courage.” It wasn’t until her father passed away, though, that she began to think about writing poetry without musical accompaniment.
“It was about four years ago that he passed,” Hockett says, “and the poems started coming to me right when he left the Earth. Then my best friend, Mary Burns, who owned Java Cabana, passed last year. She always loved poetry, and one of my first shows was at the open mic poetry readings that they had there for years. I was used to working around poetry, but I didn’t consider myself to be writing poems until my father passed.”
Hockett pays tribute to those losses throughout Maps, and she even dedicated the book to Burns, in loving memory.
Dreamers Dreaming Dreams
On The Moon and the Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, released in March, Hockett duets with bonafide Memphis music royalty Carla Thomas. Hockett has sold paintings, played gigs to thousands, and now published a book. It would seem that dreaming big is second nature to her. She makes sure to note, though, the value of community in helping her pursue her dreams.
“I always say that your dream is bigger than you. It is a community thing,” she explains. “I have a whole team of people who supported me and threw dollars in my tip jar when I played at Java, or anywhere around town. I have this huge Memphis support group — of musicians, but also photographers, poets, artists, filmmakers, like Craig Brewer.”
In fact, it was through mutual friend and photographer Tommy Kha that I secured an interview with Hockett, seeming to prove the value of an artistic community — and that Memphis exerts a magnetism long after people have moved away. “It’s just been crazy how huge Memphis has been and how fostering Mary was and Java was. It’s just unbelievable,” Hockett says. “All I can do is say thank you.”
Art From the Heart
In Maps, Hockett implores readers to “be strong and soft” and to “live in gratitude for all that there is.” The book is filled with seemingly contrasting desires to be both brave and vulnerable, but it takes tremendous courage to admit to vulnerability. In this, Maps lingers on growth, a sense of striving, to reach a better understanding of self, spirit, and the world around us.
In “Done as a Poem Will Do,” Hockett addresses the power of art to move and motivate, including the ways it can help one reframe self perception. “I let the poem move me / It broke my heart, I cried,” she writes. “I let the poem shake me / Like jelly rollin’ thighs / That always wanted to be smooth / Brown, honey to the eyes.”
She also speaks often, in the book and during our interview, of planting seeds. As one reads the poems, an image begins to coalesce, a vision of the self as a garden — multifaceted, many-hued, in need of both pruning and watering, sun and shade. And, perhaps most of all, of root systems intertwining, connecting flowers that, to the untrained eye, seem separate.
“I deal a lot of times with showing those connections through the poems, and about how they connect us universally. Not just with those who we immediately love, but with the oneness of humanity,” Hockett says. “I love how ‘art’ rhymes with ‘heart’ and how ‘heart’ can be made into ‘Earth’ if you change the lettering around. I just think that art is a particular way to ignite people’s open-heartedness and their love.
“I know my purpose on this Earth is to use all of those tools to help bring people together,” Hockett continues. “There is so much diversity, and there are so many differences, but respect — when Aretha said ‘Respect,’ that means you don’t necessarily have to believe what the next person believes. Just have some respect for their humanity, their dignity. You can remind people that there’s something deeper than the body, there’s something deeper than the color of your skin or whether you’re male, female, or other. It’s not about making everyone think the way you think. How much more beautiful that we all believe different things? How could bridges be built if you didn’t have all these collective minds?”
Maps and Unexpected Turns
Both Maps for the Modern World and The Moon and the Stars were originally slated for release in 2020. That was, of course, before the coronavirus pandemic made touring to support an album or book all but impossible.
“My record was just finished. The book was finished,” Hockett remembers. “My whole life just suddenly stopped.” The prospect of a year — or more — without any income worried her. Then the poet did what she does in uncertain times and went to her family home in Humboldt to sit by the pond and ponder changes. Pausing, it turns out, helped her gain perspective.
“Just look at all the healing that needs to happen, because so many things were brought to the surface last year, that have always been there, with systemic racism and injustice, how the seeds of negativity can be watered in a person through a comment or a tweet,” Hockett says. She goes on to talk about the many lives lost to covid-19, about trying to feel the depth of those losses.
“When we come back together, my goal is to find ways that we come back together in love, that we come back together in mindfulness and kindness.”
Hockett has one request, and it’s one she’s made in all her recent interviews: “Please, stop and take some time to think about all the lives we’ve lost, and put blessings on the people’s families who are still remaining. Really feel that.”
But, flowers need darkness as well as light to grow, and even the worst tragedies can teach vital lessons. “One of the most beautiful things we did see was just communities and people helping each other,” Hockett says, finding reason to hope. “I loved that, and I want to keep that going.”
Riding into the Sunset
Hockett’s voice rises and falls over the phone, and even though the discussion touches often on causes for sadness, she returns again and again to reasons for joy. She laughs often, and her laugh is infectious, underlining another message I found in her writing: Joy is a gift, and one that is not diminished for being shared.
The poet has hopes for the future, for new ways to grow the garden we all share. She speaks of finding ways to tour that are gentler on the Earth, of extending grace and dignity to ourselves and our neighbors. “When we come back together, my goal is to find ways that we come back together in love, that we come back together in mindfulness and kindness,” Hockett says. “How do we do it? I don’t know, but I hope the poems ask the questions, and keep it on people’s minds. Because if it’s on your mind, you’re going to start making some changes.”
Dreams thrive in spite of doubt, and much of Maps deals with inspiration — with finding it in nature, or our relationships, or in ourselves — so it seems a fitting note on which to end. But what inspires Hockett? “I’m inspired when I run across creators who don’t let that little voice inside that says, ‘Ah, you’re not a painter. You’re not this, that, or the other. You’ll never do that.’ They don’t let that voice win. They tell it to shut the hell up, and they do it anyway!”
