The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

Walk with Me: On Poetry and Music

Walk with Me On Poetry and Music In the sense that I am one of those poets who whisper and mutter lines aloud to themselves as they work, I have always “performed ” my poems. Even before I wrote them down, I was a child who loved to hypnotize herself by singing little songs over and over. I remember one day discovering that, if I whispered the word “iron” to myself enough times, it would sound very satisfyingly unfamiliar: “iron, iron, iron, iron, iron . . .” The tendency to turn to tune gave me eclectic taste—Mother Goose to Vachel Lindsay, African praise song to Tristan Tzara, Middle English lyric to Swinburne—and led me to write my Arst book of poems as a species of libretto. For this self-published venture, I took The Encyclopedia of Scotland, the lengthy collagestyle pastiche of voices and texts I had been working on throughout my early twenties, and distilled it to a script for musical performance. Hearing myself and others perform my tunes and chants felt authentic in a different way from seeing my poems in print. I felt as if my private world were being brought alive, as if I were alone in primeval calm at the same time I performed on the stage. And hearing my words with music or even chanted still feels, for want of a better word, shamanistic, like the deepest, most valuable kind of play. Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind inBuenced me strongly as I was starting to develop my aesthetic. Jaynes claims that poetry, like music, is heard in the right brain, while other kinds of language are heard in the left brain. When I hear my poems performed with music or chanted voices, I feel more strongly the familiar right-brain hypnotic charge which often accompanies the original act of writing. 29 The Arst writing I did for more mainstream performance was a hymn for a conference at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The panel was called “New Hymn Texts: Poets’ Views” and included a theology professor and a Christian hymnal editor. A goddess-worshipping pagan, I was not sure they would want me—but they agreed, as long as I avoided the term “Goddess” and used “Mother God” instead. I was excited about channeling my strong liturgical tendencies into a mainstream context, but just as much about writing a text in which formal skill and rigor would be absolutely necessary. Over the next few months, reading many hymns and revising mine repeatedly, I found that I needed to keep the language simpler than I had expected because, my collaborator informed me, 60 percent of the meaning of words is lost on the hearer when they are sung. Even more suprisingly, the meter had to be absolutely regular (after I had roughened it up with some cleverly placed trochees, I was told to take them out since the variations would be confusing for an organist). When the hymn was sung for the Arst time by the audience for the panel in New York, I realized that it was now Anished. It had needed human voices to complete it. Since that time I have had my work set and performed in many arrangements: sung by a soloist, duet, or choir; chanted by an earth spirituality group; sung as opera; choreographed for dancers. Almost every time, I experience that thrill of simple feeling which Arst drew me to this kind of work. I have heard some poets say they dislike hearing their poems set to music because it muddies the effect. I understand this theoretically, and certainly would And it true for some of my poems, but generally so far the right-brain pleasure has trumped any other aspect of the experience. At best, new aspects of the poem are brought out. Once, I heard a chorus of one hundred voices singing an overlapping collage of lines and words from my poem “Walk with Me.” That composer’s arrangement surprised me by bringing out a dark, earthy heaviness I had not noticed in the poem before, and it forever and wonderfully altered the poem for me: now whenever I read the title, the indelibly deep voices of the bass section always intone those Arst three words. Perhaps the best word I can And for the ease and freedom I have experienced in writing for musical collaboration is “be30 longing.” Knowing my words will be set to music makes me...