I often wish I would've been born a musician, versed in something a little more accessible than poetry, a medium more broadly listened to, directly understood. This is not to say that poems aren't, in moments, perhaps at their best moments, perfectly and precisely clear. They are. Or rather, they can be. Its just that, well, who, at some point in their lives, when a song is really working, doesn't wish that they could do that. Partially because a lot of the people I grew up with were musically talented, I tried, at an incredibly young and awkward age, to be a singer in a punk band (Small Varookies), then, as my more angry dispositions began to wear away, an indie rock band (the Lousy Apples), neither of which amounted to much beside giving my friends and I something else to do while we were busy getting stoned. I couldn't sing, and I most certainly couldn't play guitar. But I wanted to, if not purely for the love of music as a medium capable of existing in the space where language falls a little short, at least for the selfish, empty romance of it, the privilege of being able to tell girls I was in a band. That, however, never quite panned out for me in the way I would've liked it to, though, for a lot of folks I know, playing music is oftentimes the quickest and least resistant path in such matters. For this reason, and for others, a lot of the poets I know would also rather be musicians. While many of them are, I'm glad that first and foremost, they mostly stick to words.
A friend of mine from Iowa, Steve Toussaint, one of the most promising young poets I've been luckily enough to know and work with over the last few years, talks almost exclusively about poetry as though the pages actually carried song. For him, I think they do. For a lot of us, they do. In one of Steve's imaginary class proposals, called "Volume and Pitch," he proposes quite beautifully that "a poem’s sonic properties haunt the page, silently. In workshop discussions, we depend on metaphors of music: a poem’s ending is “quiet” or “loud”; we “hear” strains of Oppen in a specific rhetorical construction or of Dickinson in an uncanny metaphor; we praise the generous “silences” that occur in the suspension of a line break or in the use of white space; we speak of echoes; we speak of voice.” I like that he proposes this, not only because it brings me back to Iowa and the conversations we would have there, but because he's right. If a poem is working, a voice does eventually arise, a subtle music formed, over time, from the framework into which the the thinking and the language of the poet have been placed. But you have to listen. You have to sing along. If the music isn't there, its prose.
The problem, of course, in locating the actual "music" of a poem, or of a song for that matter, is in the subjectivity of such an undertaking, in the differences which delineate our ears. What's present for one is all-too-often absent for another. Which is fine. A good artist can spend an entire lifetime cultivating their attention to such things and never arrive, not fully, at an explanation for why something does or doesn't move them. This is equally true of audience and reader, which one would need to also be, I imagine, to be any good at writing music or making poems in the first place. When I watch any of my musician friends being worked on by a good song, the extent of the effect is rarely, if ever, expressed in language. Usually they close their eyes and flail about. A certain, far off look takes over them, a trance-like state of being in two worlds at the same time. Often, they appear more a part of the world the music has carved out for them then of the world from which I'm watching. My friend Ryan likes to hunch down low and flip his middle finger at the crowd when the members of his band, Marijuana Death Squad, finally come together, crashing their surreal assault of glitches and drums, screams and static, through the barroom like a wave. My friend Drew mostly enters into spasms, brief moments of retardation while he's driving.
Ultimately, I think its better the reasons art works, especially audible art, remain largely abstract, beyond directly verifiable or immediately locatable explanations. Maybe its even necessary. For the Spanish poet Lorca, what infused creation, what guided the creative act, was "a force, not a labour, a struggle, not a thought." Borrowing a term from Latin American folklore, Lorca named this force, then spent an entire essay,"The Theory and Play of the Duende", trying and failing to define it. Though one does get a sense of what he means, not only through his attempts to give the spirit of Duende an actual, distinctive measurement and meaning, but also, and perhaps more so, one feels it stirring up within them as they read it, rising ghost-like in the general roll and delicate velocity of the essay itself. For example: "The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet. Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it." In this sense, the artist is as much a conduit as a creator. I like the idea of being possessed by something that is at once outside and inside the artist very much, an invasive spirit, an other-worldly muse or ghost whose voice is moving your voice, whose inventions become your inventions. Of course one could argue that there are no such things as ghosts, but ghosts, I would say, is as close a metaphor as one can get for that which haunts us out of us and into something more.
I also like that Duende, like a ghost is, is impossible to track down. As one is prone to do in the insular and self-indulgent environment of a poetry MFA program, my friends and I would spend hours at the Fox Head bar arguing over what did and didn't have it. And like a lot of arguments over poetry, the answers were as vast and varied as the people asking the questions. For me, the song above, by the National, has it, as does the song "My Love is a Forest Fire" by a band called Y La Bamba from Portland. I challenge anyone to listen to this song, to the girl who's singing it, and not be at once broken and lifted up. A poet named Frank Stanford has it is in spades. Also, anything by Tom Waits.
If there is anything I want poems to do, it's what happens to me when I hear these songs. I couldn't tell you what that feeling is exactly, but I know it when I feel it, and it is terrifying, beautiful, and it is true. For awhile and against my will, I leave the world of things behind me. Something foreign enters. I do my best to sing.
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