Friday 26 March 2021

Christopher Merrill : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is the most important element of my poetry, perhaps because I am a musician manqué. It is probably no accident that I married a classical violinist; accordingly, I have had the good luck to spend a lot of time in the company of musicians, who give me new ways to think about the music of verse—i.e., prosody, which is one of my obsessions. My ear is attuned to speech rhythms, which may or may not fall into traditional meters, and my fingers are always tapping out the beats; when I hear something strange or off-kilter my imagination may catch fire. I live for that.

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