How important is music to your poetry?
In sixth grade, my English instructor created a month-long poetry curriculum for us, and we began by listening to spoken word poets. This became an obsession for me, and I spent countless hours after class on the library computers listening to it. I hadn’t ever heard words used the way they were in poems, and nothing had ever moved me as much as these sounds did. After this, I started looking for poetry in every sound. Now, there is poetry in everything for me — in the squeal of the train on its tracks as it takes me to work, the pigeon-purr of my cat once I arrive home. I also hold so many actual songs close and believe that they too helped me understand how sound would be portrayed in my writing. There are a lot of lyrically skilled musicians, especially in rap. Any poet who isn’t listening to rap could benefit from it; the time put into the rhyme scheme and literary devices of well-written rap bars is often impressive.
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