Ankh Spice : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Enormously important. I think in a way music *was* the beginning of poetry for me - my mother sang to me even before I was born, and right through my childhood. Story-songs, poems-to-music, an enormous and eclectic range; opera, folk, songs in te reo Maori, in Irish, cowboy ballads, Victorian-era weepies. Her own mother was a comic-opera singer, and she carried that particular delight in sound-word weaving in her blood, and passed it to me, and I think all of that early immersion still resounds in my work. I learned to read music at the same time I learned to read words, very early, well before I started school. I play three instruments, and like the house I grew up in where the record-player or radio was a constant, under our roof it’s very seldom there’s no music playing. I write much of my poetry in my head as I run, swim, move around, and that’s always with headphones in, music on. I think it’s two types of flow state in confluence there – our brains find one momentum in movement and one momentum in music, and together they’re a powerful crucible for an art form where rhythm and sound is so key. It’s always beautiful to me when people have said, hearing me read, that they hear the rhythm, flow, and music through my work. I do think the rhythms of our head-voices, if we can translate them into poems, find synch with the ones inside other people’s heads, and when that happens, it’s special. There are a couple of poems in the book that very directly reference music – Songbird requiem (Liberae me), after Haroula Rose, and Ninth Wave (IV: Finale, D minor), which is a reference to Beethoven’s Ninth – but it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that almost every poem in the book contains music in one way or another.