How important is music to your poetry?
I’m answering this question in terms of listening to the live or recorded music of musicians rather than the music inherent in a line of poetry—the latter is obviously crucial, and usually where my poems start: a word, a phrase, the way certain sounds go together. So, that said, I try to keep my poems open to the art I encounter and the conversations about art that I have with others Music is a natural/crucial part of those conversations, so it finds its way into my poems quite regularly. (Frankly, I would love to write—or even simply read—a book of poems that is composed as a series of record reviews.) Lou Reed, John Fahey, Pantera, Talking Heads, etc., all show up in my book, right alongside John Donne, Hafiz, and Whitman. They are all a part of the culture stew of my life, so I try not to separate them out. When I was younger, I always had music on when writing. It felt normal to write with Bad Brains playing; it was just a part of the sensory tapestry of the experience of making. I still do sometimes listen to music while writing, though the music needs to be something less sonically insistent, like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports or Anouar Brahem’s The Astounding Eyes of Rita. And even with those records, I find I’ll need to pause them to figure out the sound of a specific line. In those moments I need the silence to focus. My old professor Stanley Plumly once told me good work requires devotion. I think I half-believed it at the time, but I find it increasingly to be true.
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