How important is music to your poetry?
If I accidentally overhear even a sliver of a tune in the morning, I often lose those dream shreds that are vital, at least for me, to writing poems. So in some ways music is fatal to my poetry.
But sometimes someone in one of my poems is listening to a particular song in order to create an associative or suggestive effect. I love overhearing strangers’ song choices and thinking about whether they’re actually into what they’re listening to, or whether it’s happenstance. For example, a few years ago when I was buying a turntable off Kijiji the seller put on Bryan Adams to demonstrate the sound quality. Was that his favourite? Or did he take one look at me and think, “Cuts Like a Knife”?
There are certain albums that light my brain up and make me want to write poems the next day, though – Lyra Pramuk’s Fountain, Amen Dunes’s Cowboy Worship EP, Moss’s Sub Templum, anything by Arthur Russell, Florist, Francis Bebey, Floating Points, ANOHNI. Also, Phil Elverum’s old songs (and tweets) were very influential to my first book, On High.
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