The sense of the line
Listening to my son practice piano has changed my sense of the poetic line. I think the ear and the mind can both discover poetry techniques from music composition.
In a 1931 lecture, composer Arnold Schoenberg credited Mozart with teaching him "the art of unequal phrase lengths," or "the art of creating secondary ideas." From Bach, he learned "the art of inventing groups of notes such that they provide their own accompaniment" and "the art of creating the whole from a single kernel," namely the 12-tone revolution that develops from a single kernel that is both melody and accompaniment.
Musical forms enacting structural return and improv
And once again it was June—mild, long, slowly fading evenings, evenings promising so much that no matter what you do with them, you always receive the impression of defeat, of wasted time. Nobody knows the best way to get through them. March straight ahead or maybe sit at home before a wide-open window so that the warm air, saturated in the sounds of summer, may permeate the room and mingle with books, ideas, metaphors, with our breath. No, but that’s not right either, it’s not possible. You can only mourn them, those unending evenings, mourn them when they pass, as the days grow shorter. They can’t be seized. Perhaps these long June evenings can only be perceived by way of regret, remembrance, nostalgia. They can’t be plumbed: you’d need to head for the park, one foot in front of the other, while sitting simultaneously on the terrace and listening to the voices of the city fall still as the last blackbirds sing … But that won’t do either. Birdsong has no form, no adagio, no allegro. In a detailed study of music, a certain philosopher once observed that “nightingales don’t listen to other nightingales sing,” only somewhat exalted people do. Hence you can only tear yourself away when you get bored (let’s be honest here). Whereas a musical composition, subject to the discipline of form, forestalls the moment of our boredom.
Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration
Music is described as a form enacting return—structural return that relies on reprise, repetition, patterns, memory of earlier notes and melodies. A piece often begins with a statement and then returns later as ‘recapitulation,’ but with a different texture—the texture of evoking what has come before it. The bridge, or transition, mediates—to quote Daniel Berenbeim—the transition determines not only itself but what comes after it.
This repetition and accumulation are made possible by hearing—where poetic language amplifies the valences through connotation and poetic language. To repeat a word in a poem is to attract others, to collect the dust a word gathers across time and line. I am thinking of the way mom said my name….. and how this changes on the page across stanzas.
In “Singing With the Taxi Driver: From Bollywood to Babylon,” Jay Prosser describes using music as “ a channel for returning forgotten pasts” as he writes the memoir of his mother’s family. Producing the memoir replicates Berenbeim’s composition strategy as Prosser begins with mother’s statement and then recapitulates it, which can reconfigure her self-concept and mediate “what comes after.” Where the eye distinguishes and discerns, the ear blends and connects—but what makes music so hard to express in words is what makes it such a fantastic vehicle for emotional life.
Black poet Michael S. Harper borrows "black jazz man's improvisational worldview" and assumption that what he creates in the particular could be an accident, an improv, a reaction. See his poem "Corrected Review." Harper takes the artist's responsibility as activating, listening for the shifts and energizing the line through improvisation, thus moving the music forward. The improvisational worldview centers contingency while also building upon prior lines and riffs—it upcycles fragments.
First music & memories of displacement: From Teju Cole to Transtromer
The satisfaction, the pleasure, the comfort one takes in these poems comes from the way they seem to have preëxisted us. Or perhaps, to put it another way, the magic lies in their ability to present aspects of our selves long buried under manners, culture, and language. The poems remember us and, if we are perfectly still, give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves.
Teju Cole, “Miracle Speech: The Poetry of Tomas Transtromer”
The ear has a 7 month advance on the eye in fetal development. The oceanic rolling of a womb is the first lull. The first music is always a memory of displacement. Music has a way of reinhabiting the lost homeland, the songs they carried: doinas.
As we begin in a womb, my thoughts on music and poetry return to an essay by Teju Cole—an essay which incubates, still, in my mind—where he describes his affinities, the lyres to which he returns, again and again, in fascination: Bach, Arvo Part and Tomas Transtromer.
In "C Major", Tomas Transtromer's narrator leaves his lover with the first snow:
Winter had come
while they were making love.
And the streets are altered by the joy: "All things around him on the way toward the note C."
In "Allegro", the narrator ends a "black day" by playing Haydn. And the sound changes the mind as the player shoves his hands into his "hadynpockets" and raises his "haydnflag" and language expands to hold the transformative power of music.
In notes to The Great Enigma, translator Robin Fulton approaches Transtromer's "lifelong interest in poems whose growth parallels musical development", and how this works as theme and variation in his poetry. Transtromer himself points to "The Journey's Formulae" as a "bagatelle, five lines perhaps.... terribly important."
“Symmetry with deviation”
I see plants as slow-motion spontaneous gestures. They’re working according to a pattern, but they also have some spontaneity in how they grow. People who write about beauty often talk about symmetry being hardwired into our preferences. That’s not wrong, but symmetry by itself gets boring. What’s exciting, what’s pleasurable, is symmetry with deviation. And the fractal development of plants is endlessly attractive to me—the way they repeat themselves on different scales. It’s like music.
Rae Armantrout. Interview with Brian Reed, "The Art of Poetry, No. 106" Paris Review, Issue 231, Winter 2019
Jim Whiteside's fugues held loss together, or borrow the formal repetition of the fugue to recreate a sort of dialogue in motion. I thought about Mahler’s 5th Symphony played on a blade of grass when I reviewed Whiteside’s chapbook last year, and how he begins the book with a fugue.
In Latin (and in my homeland), the verb fuga means to run. Whiteside’s poems use running as a form of poetic motion, a movement that is both lyrical and essential to the questions of queer identity in many southern states.
Sometimes, the memory of him playing
runs backwards. The notes leave the room, return
to the end of his instrument, back to his body.
I also thought about Paul Celan's disruption of the fugue as a form, or rekindling of its nature in running to reconstruct the inability to run, the helplessness of Jews during the Shoah. The death fugue is one that cannot run. It begins, tries again, and falters. In Romania, it wasn’t even a fugue—it was titled as a “Tango”….
My forthcoming collection, Dor, uses the traditional music form of the doina to score dor for the voice, to render it as cross-temporal vocalization, an intimate localization.
The refrain and the lyric’s infinite “I”
Of feeling unattached to tense or personhood, Mark Strand says "it exists in an overriding infinity, out of time but responsive to time." I’m thinking of the word "Now" at the beginning of a line. And the lyric poem as one which "manifests musical properties, but one intended to be read or spoken, not sung." The tension in the lyric form links itself to musicality while holding it away, refusing it.
Lorrie Moore suggested that "every marriage needs a refrain" when written. I think marriage is one of the most dangerous thickets to enter in a poem. A refrain can be ice or flame or countless spaces on the spectrum between two dissimilar states of matter, two separate objects. But maybe we aren't quite objects--maybe the poem exists to reveal how each of us is their own epiphany.
And passion is impossible to sustain as refrain. Someone has to die. Someone must Juliet the scene. On passion, I am mute. Only grief is as intense and consuming as sexual passion. Only grief can match the desperate pitch of that emotional climate. Since both love and loss occupied epics as well as elegies—since these forms are some of the earliest vessels for poetry—the role of the chorus and refrain tangles in questions of what our species needs from sound. The lullaby that soothes a child to sleep.