How important is music to your poetry?
I’ve always loved playing with sound and rhythm in my work, but I’ve spent much of my short writing life seeking balance between the two. For whatever reason, I’ve always struggled with metre. Iambs, feet, and stresses frequently elude me, so my scansion is nothing to write home about. I do, however, generally strive for a lyric and musical line, and I pay careful attention to internal rhyme, word play, and different rhythms in the poem. I generally read a poem aloud as I’m drafting because I want to hear how the sounds meld together, how they echo. I practice reading aloud how I’d like the poem to be performed. I can’t read every poem in the same drone, so I try to figure out the tone and personality of that individual piece as I’m writing. Does it need a line break or a caesura to slow things town? Does it need to be over the top and have the same end rhyme throughout the entire poem? My gloryhole poem needed that. It really did.
No comments:
Post a Comment