How important is music to your poetry?
Very. For me it’s one of the three most important impersonal elements in my poems—the other two being metaphor and the line. Other poets I know are often obsessed with the look of their poems on a page; I’m far more concerned with how my poems sound. There’s a danger in relying on sound too much, of course. Occasionally I’ve been accused by a mentor or an editor of overemphasizing the music of a poem, to the point of facileness or opacity, but that’s a risk I’m always ready to take. Also, it’s not as if verbal music in poems only exists as a kind of sonic ornament (I’m not trying to rewrite “Jabberwocky”); as A.E. Stallings and others have pointed out, rhyme creates its own intelligence akin to that of metaphor, in that the pairing of rhymes can create connections that the poet would not have arrived at in any other way.
No comments:
Post a Comment