How important is music to your poetry?
Music is incredibly important to my poetic practice. I grew up playing piano, and I will never forget my mother insisting that I play along with a metronome she would place on our piano’s music shelf. I hated the metronome at the time, but as I practiced scales and works ranging from Beethoven to Liszt, the pulse of the song became crucial to how I perceived the world. Rhythm is science and art fused into our daily experience—even the sound of our mother’s heartbeats mimics the iamb. Music was as crucial to how I experienced the world as a child as how I do now—language a collusion of assonance and consonance, grace and instinct. I am a fan of writing in form—sonnet and villanelle, specifically—because I find that the primal order of sound helps me to organize my rhetorical and aesthetic agendas. One recent form I have become fascinated by is Jericho Brown’s duplex, a new form featured in The Tradition, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. The duplex is at once sonnet, ghazal, and blues lyric. An example of one of Brown’s duplex can be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152729/duplex
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