R.J. Lambert : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

There’s both ways to take this question: music as sonics and rhythm, or literal music. I think sonics and rhythm are important to all poetry (even those that are not “musical” are intentionally not so). But I want to answer the literal question. Moviemakers like Cameron Crowe famously create from musical inspiration, and I often do the same thing with poems. I choose some songs to rev me up and I listen to them loudly on repeat, curating an energized writing trance where I can disappear for hours. I wrote several of the final poems for my first collection while listening to Troye Sivan’s In a Dream EP during the pandemic—probably 100+ hours listening to those same six songs. There’s also an entire section in my book dedicated to “streaming” different songs by Frank Ocean, Queen, Whitney Houston, and two teenagers performing Mozart and Chopin on YouTube. A crowning achievement of my book was obtaining permission to use Frank Ocean’s lyrics from “Swim Good” as an epigraph to this “streaming” section.