Matt Robinson : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Thanks for this question. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more deliberately, at least a little bit, more recently. In particular, during the writing of the poems in my latest couple of collections: Tangled & Cleft and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some other Nights Just Work. I have had a few conversations recently that centred around this kind of question the other night over a beer or two.

What I can say with regard to the form of the poems in Tangled & Cleft is that with these poems, there was a deliberate choice I made, in addition to my usual interest in metaphor as the engine that acts as the driving force behind the lyric. I really wanted to pay closer attention to the sonic and the aural—the possibility of the music — as pretentious as that may sound, of these particular pieces. I wanted the rhythms and whatever sort of rhymes or echoes or assonances that were occurring to be centrally involved — to be an important piece of the overall experience of engaging with these poems. I wanted the sounds of this particular chunk of poetry — whether read aloud or quietly in one’s head — to be as much of a driver and central concern as the metaphors.

For context: in terms of sound and musical language and concision of ideas I really value poets like Hopkins (yes, a Victorian). I also return to John Thompson over and over again for what I hear as his stripped down, but muscular, evocation of complex emotion through stark images and metaphors. Those are key traditional poetic influences for me, in addition to poets like Stevens and Creeley and Plath (nothing super original there, I don’t think). 

But, truthfully, the biggest influence on the sounds of these poems were the songs and songwriters and records I was listening to while I was reading and writing and revising the last few years. The real influences on the sound of this most recent collection are Ben Nichols (and his band, Lucero), Matt Mays, Adam Baldwin, and early Uncle Tupelo. These are poems that owe as much to dirty old alt country songs and rootsy garage rock as they do Hopkins and Thompson and other poets. The cadence and phrasing and parsing of ideas that clang and bang about in some of these is almost homage to those lyrical models as much as anything. I’m not a songwriter, but the breath work and delivery of these poems (when I read them aloud), their use of juggling slant rhymes and clunky echoes is more Texas & Tennessee and No Depression and 1372 Overton Park and That Much Further West than it is At the Edge of The Chopping There Are No Secrets.

I hope that makes at least some sense?