This
week while constructing my own poetry, I looked to song lyrics for inspiration.
I thought that by referring to all of the songs whose words I have memorized
and incorporated into my being, a flurry of beautiful words would spontaneously
pour out of me in the form of poetry. But it didn’t work like that. I realized
that my connection with these songs was 50% from the lyrics and 50% from the
music itself, and that the reason why creating good poetry has been so elusive
for me is that it has to accomplish what a good song does using words alone.
Upon
realizing this, I remembered what Lincoln said last class -- that some songs are poems. Although the
lyrics of some songs can stand alone as poems (take, for example, “The Sound of
Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel), other songs rely on repetition and musical
bridges to carry the lyrics through to the end (just listen to most pop songs).
Other songs don’t incorporate lyrics at all -- Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 doesn’t
use any words at all, yet for many listeners it can create a
similar kind of reverie to that of great poetry. This Venn diagram of songs and
poems makes both forms of expression even more impressive to me, because a good
song requires either a union of both music and words, or music that is great independently of words, while poetry requires the words
to stand on their own and produce a kind of music themselves.
I thought your blog post was very insightful! I especially liked how you reflected on the ability of some wordless songs to create a sort of poetic reverie. Apparently we find a certain kind of rhythm or beat, whether spoken or played, soothing. This ties back into what we discussed in class, about how poetry is a spoken form of art: I also struggled to write poetry until I started to read my work out loud.
ReplyDeleteI once read a Wall Street Journal article about what makes Adele’s songs such tearjerkers:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203646004577213010291701378
The authors of the article, in conclusion with several neuroscientists and psychologists, was that there was a certain formula to the music that produced chills in people: “...musical passages started soft and then became louder; featured the abrupt entrance of a new ‘voice,’ or that contained unexpected deviations in the melody or the harmony” produced measurable tearful reactions in people. I wonder if it is possible to break beautiful music or poetry down to something this formulaic, or whether such beauty simply defies explanation.
This is a really cool connection that you saw and I actually relate to it a lot. I know when I would read my poetry back to myself I would almost always go from speaking it to singing it. Doing this really helped me find rhythm in my poetry. Despite this I never thought to use music as an inspiration for poetry. I was of the thought process that music would detract from the poetry itself, but this has given me some new perspectives to think about
ReplyDeleteConstructing poetry? Poetry is like an overflow of the bliss of being not a structuring obsession
ReplyDeleteWhile I listen to many types of music, there is a special place in my heart for complex melodic electronic music. Im not a fan of the constant WOP WOP dubstep type music, but I really enjoy the abstract nature of electronic music in general. There is a quote in an Odesza song that goes something like " by playing a sound, mixing it up, playing it backwards, adding a little frequency A here and B here, you can create a sound no one has ever heard before," and that I think is what I enjoy most about electronic music. Some artists can create a noise that conveys more depth than a paragraph of words could. Listening to Opiou live is akin to someone turning bass into maple syrup, then pouring that ultra funky concoction all over your eardrums, a feeling I have never heard duplicated by any other artist/sound. I don't get that kind of visceral satisfaction from many lyrical artists. Some electronic artists are able to capture an immense amount of emotion in tones, that don't so much plant an idea in ones head like lyrics, but carry the listener on a journey through an audial landscape. Similar to modern Beethoven, a journey without being directed by words, yet there is still intent in the music. The artist imbued it with some emotional direction, and I believe that each of us can feel that intention on a certain level, though it might show up to each of us as a slightly different feeling.
ReplyDelete