Bonapartes Retreat and Liberty

Bonapartes Retreat_Liberty

Playing music is important to my poetry in several ways.  Most simply but maybe most profoundly, it relaxes my mind and spirit and sometimes opens a creative void that a poem or fragment might flow into.

The attention to rythmn, meter, and melodic progresssion inform my poetry at a deep level such taht even if I’m not consciously tinking of them in relation to a poem they are there, gently nudging me one way or another.

Thirdly, the discipline of music, of practice, practice, and more practice has instilled in me the habit of working poems as I work a piece of music, sometimes obsessing over a single word until I get it right.

What about you?  Even if you don’t play and instrument, does music inform your writing? If so, how?

Mike

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1 thought on “Bonapartes Retreat and Liberty

  1. oh yes, music is the pure space of poetry that i sing through the strings of my mountain dulcimer. not for performance. but for personal meditative odyssey. it informs my work, the cadence of my ear, like a boy whistling on a bicycle, making up his world as he rides…

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