How important is music to your poetry?
Very, I hope. But perhaps what I am after when I fit words into verse is something just shy of music. When I write a poem, there’s a lot of muttering the lines aloud; it’s how I test repetition, how I scoop out little hollows of assonance, how I arrive at echoes, how I figure out the poem’s tectonics.
Muttering aloud is also the only way I can refine line length. Which must mean that rhythm does matter to me even though I’m terrible at scansion. Maybe it’s not feeling at ease with poetry’s music theory that makes me doubt my poems’ claim to music.
Anyway: I do hope to keep learning, little by little, more about rhythm. And rhyme, too.
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