How important is music to your poetry?
I have a complex relationship with music. I didn’t grow up in a musical family, there was very little music in the house, it was always classical and it was rarely played. However, my sister and I were encouraged to study music and we played a couple of instruments and were in choirs. I had no talent whatsoever. I felt I could never understand music and this fascinated me. Music remains a great mystery to me. I listened to a lot of rock and metal in my late teens and early twenties until I discovered opera and it changed my life. I stopped listening to music when I was 30 after being ill. I didn’t listen to any music for about five or six years nor was I writing, they seem interconnected. I write about music in my poetry on occasion (for example, in “A Shorter Flight than Air” I write about meeting music in an abstract sense). Music is important to me because my poetry, not only the lyrical, always starts with a rhythm in my head that I then form words from. It has always been like that even before I ever studied poetry. At first the sound of words seems more important and I have to force myself to really think about their meaning. Perhaps poetry is the only form of music that I have a real connection to.
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