How important is music to your poetry?
Very! When I first began writing I wanted to be a novelist, maybe because I wrongly believed that writing fiction would come more naturally to me than writing poetry, but after a few years I realized that what I really love are not characters and narrative, but the sound of language itself. Rhythmical speech has a hypnotic power, something that even young children experience when they encounter it in nursery rhymes, children’s books, and lullabies, and that same power acts on us when we hear a great poem read out loud. A few poems that I especially enjoy hearing are Hopkins’ “The Windhover,” Millay’s “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,” and Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.”
But it’s never just a matter of working each line up into maximum aural richness: the point is to make the poem’s aurality expressive, so that sound and semantic meaning operate in meaningful relationship to one another, sometimes drawing together, sometimes pulling apart.
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