How important is music to your poetry?
I believe that music in poetry is often paraphrase-able and is sometimes at its best when it works in counterpoint (or in opposition) to what any summary of the poem might suggest the poem is about. I love the way Emily Dickinson’s profound ambivalence about the nature (or existence) of the divine comes couched in the music of hymn meter. Is the hymn meter ironic? Or does it create a musical backdrop of faith against which the poem works out its doubts? And what to make of the complex syncopation of “The Weary Blues” or “Not Waving But Drowning,” one paraphrase-able rhythm and tune interrupting and undercutting the previous one. Poems have melodies, though it takes some study to learn how to describe the qualities of melody. Still, music is inseparable from poetry; without it, there is no poetry.
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