How important is music to your poetry?
In most of my poetry, music is as central as the image and the well-wrought phrase. Even vers libre demands attention to rhythm, consonance, and assonance. There is great joy in trying out, sounding out, even occasionally singing a poem to see if the best words have found their best order, to quote Coleridge. Often I fail and return to the line, the strophe, the whole poem. Sometimes I work from a prose paragraph before breaking it like brittle and arranging the lines in multiple modes across and down the page. That's when music is absolutely the deciding factor, when the visual and the aural coalesce to help create a pleasing and a logical--or mind-bending--form.
Joy Harjo says that in Native cultures, there is little to no difference between and among poetry, song, and dance. The arts flow naturally from one form into another. Our Western minds are a bit too stiff for that fluidity, but I appreciate the underlying centrality of music to each of those three forms of art. The song must be heard; the dance is both heard and seen. And so is the poem. It is literature; it is music; it is performance. In its printed or digital form, it can be carried down for generations the way we used to do with song and oral history.
Music is key to memory, and both memory and music are keys to poetry, to poetry that resounds, that's resilient, that resists and refines and revises our thoughts, our knowledge, our stringent proprieties. Music breaks boundaries, so it's an element of poetry I will always pursue. It can't be restrained but it can be courted. It makes a poem dance into the imagination.
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