MUSICALITY IN POETRY

(The following is from an e-mail conversation between Jake Berry and Hank Lazer. Lazer sent a first draft of an essay on musicality in poetry asking for Berry's response and advice. Berry extracted sections of the essay and e-mailed the responses back to Lazer.)

LAZER: By following the lead of the sounds of words, the poems take me to unexpected places. Thus the poem does not set out to be about something, but is the emergence and actualizing of something – with its own specific music – an experience in sound.

BERRY: Poems begin with sounds. You might hear the sounds in the world around you or you might hear them in your head, but they begin as pre-linguistic sounds. Not necessarily pre-lingual because you may, as I often am when writing both poems and songs, physically make the sounds - and they are often not words, or any words we have listed in our languages. They are like glossolalia or speaking in tongues. But as St. Paul points out in his first letter to the Corinthians, where there are tongues there must be an interpreter. In this case the interpretation is not a translation of sound into absolute meaning, but of sounds into words whose meaning is subjective. Let me give you an example from the words that are lying next to me on the desk from a song I was recording last night.

Look out over the valley
into the fields of fire below,
like the sea they roll.
Tell Mama Loa
Her lost tribes are coming home,
like the sea they come

All of these words came out of my mouth as a melody as I playing a chord progression. In this case they came out as fully formed words. I changed one line to make it more obviously general. Where you read "Her lost tribes" - the word that came to me was Israelites. And while we may be willing to think of Israelites in terms of any captive people coming home, I wanted to suggest that people thought forever lost are coming home. And two tribes did return and became the Israelites from then on. So the thinking always comes after the sound and that one line is all I've really thought much about - the rest of it is as much a mystery to me as to you. Why Mama Loa? and who are her lost tribes, etc.? The same questions can be asked all over the place in either DAYS or THE NEW SPIRIT. The answer of course resides in the mystery, and in allowing that mystery to live without explanation. Sounds rose from the depths of your chest or your head or both and they made the poem all by themselves. Yet the poet is defined by his or her poetry, so by inhabiting you the poem makes you who you are, which is finally, always, a mystery.

LAZER: To my ear and eye, Robert Creeley’s poetry (particularly in its cadence, in it brilliant use of hesitation and shift in direction) and Larry Eigner’s poetry (particularly in its deployment on the page) constitute two of the more noteworthy adventurings into music that respects and partners silence. To take the term music more literally, it would be difficult to consider the resources of silence without careful attention to the music of Thelonious Monk (an important influence on Creeley, who tells us repeatedly that his attention to jazz, not to poetic models, gave him his fundamental sense of rhythmic and aural possibilities for poetry).

BERRY: Eigner especially and silence. He used silence as well as any poet I've ever read and he makes it completely obvious on the page. Creeley, too, absolutely. And Duncan gave credit to Eigner's influence on his own work which is so musical. I loved how he kept time with his hand as he read. It helped him, but it also informs us - this is music. And Duncan isn't so much a dance in silence like Monk or Creely, but is a dense tongue saturated with silence.

LAZER: Let me turn, then, to a couple of very specific instances of what I’ve come to call (in a passage in The New Spirit) “thinking / singing.” The two poems, #3 and #5, are from Days. My first suggestion is that “meaning” and “musicality” are inseparable, coincidental, and simultaneous. It’s not that a poet “has something in mind” and “tries to express it.” The poem is the thinking, is an embodiment, a highly specific incarnation and manifestation of an interval of consciousness. While I don’t mean to suggest that poems do not have meaning, I do think that viewing a poem as an object to be re-stated in terms of a theme or an underlying idea amounts to a kind of linguistic strip-mining – a process that extracts an element at the expense of the overall verbal terrain. Instead, I’d ask a reader/listener to hear and see the poem (as clearly and attentively as possible, perhaps in the state of mind that Shunryu Suzuki [revise: give some info on SS/cite book] calls “beginner’s mind,” or in a state that Keats called “negative capability”). That is, read for appreciation and read without preconception – as much as possible.

BERRY: The meaning is derived from the music - the music tells you what the words are and where they are placed on the page. I like your phrase "interval of consciousness" - as in musical intervals. To look further and deeper into this I recently ran across, in a collaborative collage with Jim Leftwich, musical notation of a pulsar's tones/intervals. I haven't set down and actually played it yet, but pulsars (and probably everything else) generate sounds that can be musically notated. Messien, as well as the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, charted bird song and made it the basis of some of their compositions. Music, or patterned sound, seems to be a natural phenomenon - as is mathematics most likely (at least numerable cycles). Language appears to be an off-shoot of music - probably a secondary form that became useful for utilitarian purposes and eventually overwhelmed it's parent. One thinks of the Titans and Olympians and similar mythic revolutions. And Babel of course, as you make clear, where language breaks apart and divides us from one another. Written language is yet another remove from music - for a theory about the destructive influence of the written word see Leonard Shlain's THE ALPHABET VS. THE GODDESS. It is only with beginner's mind and negative capability that we can recover from the neuroses of language as purely utilitarian - poetry, as I said in Silence and the Hammer (in collaboration with Wayne Sides' photographs), is the only language that doesn't kill. It breaks language at the root of its utilitarian branch and restores its musical possibilities and thereby frees it to mean in the deep imagination of the species. Which is what you seem to be saying in the two excerpts below:

LAZER: The entire poem itself took a matter of a few minutes to write. I would suggest that it only could have been written through a giving over of my immediate attention to the pathway of sounds, to the music of the quickly shifting phrases and directions of the poem – not through a preconception having to do with meaning or message.

Perhaps a careful listening to the music of the poetry (as a kind of first intensity, an initial lyricism of reading) will eventually allow for different concepts of meaning to emerge.


Poems don’t have to be about something; the poem itself is a primary thing in the world. I think of poems – as in the best of Creeley – as intervals of consciousness. And the musicality of the poem – including shifts in direction, shifts in tempo, playing off of similar sounds – is intrinsic to the embodiment of a particular interval of consciousness.

BERRY: They are an awakening to the Real - to nature before the imposition of abstract meaning - which is often not actually abstracted from the poem anyway, but projected onto the poem out of the insecurity of the reader/listener - the need to know definitely what a poem means.

LAZER: Think, then, of #5 as a kind of brief performance – a mind in motion, a thinking-in-process, a move that has some kinship with a flock of birds shifting direction mid-flight or a school of fish in clear water suddenly turning in another direction. It is the grace and humor and uniqueness of these intervals of verbal engagement that intrigue me, and the unpredictable directions that arise when poems begin with the musicality of an initiating phrase that takes on a life of its own.

BERRY: Its really observing something or someone else isn't it? You are writing the poem, but that's the conventional afterthought, the poem is something else that is happening. It is neither of the 'I' not separate from it. Part of the humor arises from the way it displays the fallacy of singularity on the personal level. 'I' try to read it, make it mean, but it defies me, forces me to open up and then it tells me things that I later call meaning. And when I return to it, the whole process happens again, only now it means more, or something entirely different. Who has changed, me or the poem? If I trust nature, I would say both have changed.

LAZER: Spiritual experience as something that occurs in large part through a summoning to hear.

BERRY: Right. But who summons who? Does the poem come when I want it or does it come of its own accord? I must be available to it in order to write it, but I can't force it. Perhaps its a kind of deal. I will be here waiting for you, and listening in a particular, if you want to come, if you want to speak/sing.

LAZER: That breath, that barely enunciated gust, a whisper or a breath on the border of becoming a word, may be as close to the forbidden name of the divine as is permitted.

BERRY: Your at the heart of it now. Breath. Song, as humans can know it, and probably everything that breathes to live, begins with the aspirations, the exhale and inhale, the beat and silences of the heart, the flow of blood in the veins, etc. These things allow us to tune ourselves in various ways and be instruments of the song - whether we are writing/singing or reading/hearing a poem. Its the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruach - the in-spire-ation.

LAZER: The “serious” suggestion is that charm and play and an unforeseen language exploration constitutes a form of realism, a mode of representation that includes the enigmatic and the irreducible quality of the real (as opposed to a more tidy thematized reduction of the real), that recognizes the playful as a constitutive (and perhaps less predictable) element of the real.

BERRY: And it may be the industrialized mind that forces this distinction between work and play. That is where the split becomes painfully obvious, where work becomes something we do because we must, to survive in an urban environment. There is definitely work in pre-industrialized culture, but the distinction between work and play is blurred and the results of one's work are evident in the food on the table, the dwelling you build, or the song you sing (often while you work). Post-industrial society, in some cases, offer us an alternative. But we are just beginning to recognize the implications.

LAZER: As Heidegger understood, “Our own manner of thinking still feeds on the traditional nature of thinking, the forming of representational ideas”, and thus “we moderns can learn only if we always unlearn at the same time. Applied to the matter before us: we can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally”.

BERRY: Thinking, or how we define and do it, is increasingly problematical. We don't want to abandon the utilitarian functions of consciousness, but we no longer wish to be enslaved by it either. So we are going through a period of expansion in what thinking is and how it may be applied. We'll fail utterly if we don't allow imagination to be the primary source of thought. We can't afford to dismiss imagination as something we are allowed to do in our leisure time (if then, often we sit on our couches and let others imagine for us or, at the very least, direct and shape our imagination.) We can't afford, as naturally free creatures, to relinquish the responsibility to allow our imaginations to operate without predefined limits. Poetry, the kind you are talking about, the kind we practice, offers an infinite area of play and compels the willing reader/listener, or more accurately, the co-participant, to run out into those open spaces. Duncan again, The Opening of the Field.

LAZER: A kind of lateral move in language that trusts the resources of language (and the accidents and heuristics of improvisation) enough to adventure into an uncharted acoustical space.

What is insisted upon is not hearing as some transcendental and ahistorical event, but hearing as precisely rooted in immediate historical circumstance, in the particulars that at any given moment (in the listener’s or reader’s or writer’s given moment) allow some musics to be heard and others not.

The musical space entered into in the composition of The New Spirit is “not a known condition,” just as “toward the/ middle trane played ahead of any sense he already understood”. Thus Coltrane provides a model, but not a constraining model precisely because he chose to play “just ahead of any sense he already understood”.

BERRY: It is so vital that people understand this - "just ahead of any sense he already understood." I always feel that I am writing over my head. The poem is not some thing or event I am trying to relate. I don't know what it is, or what is happening. Often when listening to Coltrane or Ayler or Coleman or whoever, you feel like you are being pulled from your body. This is because these artists were "disembodied" by the very sounds they were making. Yet it is the body that makes it possible. It is said that the angels sometimes envy us, or as Elvis Costello sang, "the angels want to wear my red shoes."

LAZER: A particular and idiosyncratic sounding that takes its part in a larger and often unapparent choral offering, a collective that we participate in by virtue of our peculiar human residency in and determination by language. The sounding by means of poetry is perhaps our best and most serious play, our playing with the instrument and exploring the possibilities of and in language.

BERRY: Our play is our work, and it is the most grueling kind of work because it demands both mental and physical vitality. Nothing in my experience is more totally demanding on my entire being than intimate contact with a strong work of art. Whether I am its creator or its observer (which is to say its re-creator), it drives me beyond all other demands and out of what I thought was possible. To put it in seriously playful rhyme - it kills, heals and reveals all at once.