Regan Good : part three

How important is music to your work:

You mean rhythm and sound combined?  Without music, it is not poetry.  It just isn’t.  It is something else that could be interesting for other reasons, but music is elemental to poetry.  Music is the engine; thought is not the engine.  No music?  You have prose maybe artfully arranged.  To me it is Death.  That is the truth.  Poetic music was first the sound of clapping or feet stamping around a fire, maybe with some chanting or groans added in.  Rhythmic utterance, incantation, dream, intuition, song, prayer.  Music is the most elemental part of the art and I refuse to abandon it.  There are some interesting flat sounding poems out there that do work, so what do I know?  Still, how else does one really reach another place?  You need transport.  It is true that you have to be sure you don’t lie with your music.  Be careful that it doesn’t lull you into saying a half-truth or something sentimental or fuzzy.  I was preoccupied with that at Iowa, how to ensure I didn’t lie.  I was obsessed—and I still am; I wanted my poems to be pure.  In graduate school, I dropped all my dumb, half-understood college girl tools and began to work without any nets at all.  It was a mess but necessary.  (I was reminded yesterday that in high school I had wanted to be a hybrid of Thomas Wyatt and Joni Mitchell!) I’m finally seeing how that ugly period led to the poems I am writing now, the poems I wanted to write 25 years ago.  Things take a long time to settle in art, one’s own art, if you are really putting pressure on your work.  So, please, everyone remember that art is not a race, though our culture makes it seem so.