Cynthia Ross might be a rocker at heart, but it’s a heart full of dreams that emerge daily as poetry.
“The poems just come first thing in the morning,” she says. “I call it floating on feelings.” Her first collection of poetry, “The Secret Door,” is now in print along with an accompanying CD and vinyl LP, which sets to music several of the pieces in the book.
“I’ve written poetry all my life but never shared them with anyone,” she states. “I have hundreds of poems.”
Prior to her concentration on the written word, Ross was a musician in one of those bands that you may wonder why you have never heard of. Well, one reason might be that they were too wary of record companies to sign a deal, but the all-female late-70s pop/punk combo “The ‘B’ Girls” managed to open for The Clash, Blondie, Ramones, Dead Boys, Elvis Costello and more while only releasing one single, on Bomp! Records.
Many songs were recorded during the band’s lifetime—produced by Debbie Harry and Mick Jones — but they were not released until 2017 on the LP “Bad Not Evil.”
Ross grew up in Toronto, where, she remembers, she first got into rock and roll.
“I was 10 or 11 when I saw The Rolling Stones on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ and that was it for me!” she recalls. “I was hooked from that moment on.”
It was 1969 when she saw Jimi Hendrix open for The Doors, and not long after, she ran into Leonard Cohen at a bookshop and sat down with him for coffee: “He was playing that night and gave me tickets. I took my mother.”
“There was a really good music scene in Toronto,” she notes. “There was a great warehouse space called ‘Crash ‘n’ Burn,’ but it didn’t last long.”
After frequently running into “two girls who were at every cool concert dressed like 1940s film stars,” Ross and one of them — Lucasta Ross — decided at a party in Phil Lynott’s hotel room after a Thin Lizzy concert that they should start a band, unhindered by the fact that neither of them played instruments.
The band’s name was based on a term for women who hustled for drinks in bars, and the sound was edgy rock and roll mixed with a fondness for the melodic harmonies of the Shangri-Las.
“We were the good girls next door who were in love with the bad guys,” Cynthia Ross explains.
She eventually moved to New York City, where she got married, had kids, and stopped playing music for a while but never left the music scene. Part of that time, she found herself back in Toronto, raising her kids, but NYC was where she returned after a few years away.
While supporting herself doing everything from cleaning apartments to designing windows for Saks Fifth Avenue, there were other bands, notably “New York Junk” with Joe Sztabnik and a new version of “The ‘B’ Girls.” But her life was marked with tragedy.
Ross’ husband, Billy Rogers, was a musician who passed away when their kids were in their teens from HIV. Boyfriend Stiv Bators of The Dead Boys, whom Ross calls “the love of my life – the last time I felt passion,” also died young. Johnny Thunders, who she met when she was 18 and was not a romantic partner, was a close friend until his untimely death.
Many of the poems in her new volume, understandably, center on grief and loss. At one point, a friend suggested that she write a memoir, but she found it too difficult.
“I wasn’t ready,” she admits. “I’ll get back to it, but right now, the poems are my memoir.”
To celebrate the launch of the new book, published by Far West Press, Ross gathered three artists together for a show at the Howl! Archive gallery on the Lower East Side, titled “The Art of Emotional Repair.” Ian Wilson, who also provided artwork for the LP and book, explains how his small, lurid paintings of B-movie actresses and various “outcasts” on the acrylic lineup with Ross’ emotional outpourings.
“Her poems are cathartic, and my paintings are cathartic for me,” Wilson said. “They get my mind out of reality.”
Eveline happened to go to a reading that Ross was doing in Paris and found that “the last poem she read, ‘With Love,’ hit my heart. I shed a tear, actually. It was not only so beautiful but also so accurate… it felt like it could have been about me.”
Following a practice she started a few years ago, Eveline hand-embroidered the poem on a nightgown so that she could “wrap myself into those words, and maybe they would infuse my soul and my dreams with its beauty. I would literally fall asleep into that poem.” The collaboration continued with Ross’ blessing, and the results are now on view at Howl!
The third artist, Zenji Fujiyama, found Ross on Instagram and proposed combining his erotic photography with her words. The result is another ongoing collaboration.
The full house at Howl! for the opening night was a success all around, with attendees praising Ross’ readings of several poems – a few with musical accompaniment – as well as the surrounding artwork. Downtown music veteran Bob Bert said of Wilson’s work, “It’s cool – it’s got a Warholesque kind of vibe.”
Musician/DJ Ashley Dalle noted that “Cynthia’s work is a spectacularly heartbreaking collection of poems that remind us all of what New York once was, and can never be again”.
“The most common thing that I hear is that my poetry makes people cry,” says Ross. “I get that — I’m exposing myself completely to people.”
Asked to say how she would describe herself, she says, “As a dreamer — definitely not a poet. ‘Poet’ is like a job title, and I never want poetry to be a job. It’s something way more divine.”
Cynthia Ross can be found on Instagram at @cynthiabgirlnyc. Ian Wilson is there at @dancing_in_the_streetssssssss. Zenji Fujiyama at @zenji_fujiyama . Eveline is online at evelineparis.com
The Howl! Show runs through March 29, with a screening of “Ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel” on March 22 and a performance by the Bushwick Book Club on the 29th (both free). Info is here: howlarts.org/event/the-secret-
