How important is music to your poetry?
It’s central, in the sense that I generally use meter even when I don’t use rhyme. The one problem with concentrating on very old poetry and linguistics is that it doesn’t leave many credit hours for contemporary poetry! So my ears were almost entirely trained by poems in meter, and I did little real study of free verse. That accounts for my habit of setting out in some sort of meter whenever I start to write a poem—turning the meter on like a spigot and letting it run. I’m as likely to begin with a rhythm as with an image or phrase. I’ve said this before: I think of rhyme as a ladder down into the dark of the subconscious and of meter as the underground spring I find there.
I’m also likely to decide at the outset that a poem is going to be in a particular form. When I admit this, other poets tell me I’m out of my mind—that the words must come first and then be helped to find form--but somehow my backwards method usually works. When it doesn’t, it takes me a long time to back out, shake off the initial sound pattern, and begin with a new one.
Music has also provided an important trigger for poems, as I’ve been a singer in various kinds of choirs for most of my life, and a cantor in various local churches. The title of my first book, Breath Control, is an allusion to singing and to the kind of held-in containment that life often requires. My third book, Mid Evil, includes a section of church-music poems. Psalm and hymn texts probably have something to do with my love of meter, too.
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