I don’t know whether everybody reads the way I do; i.e. I don’t know whether most people “hear” the sounds of a poem when they read it “to themselves.” Obviously we all hear sounds at a poetry reading. For me it is important that every poem gets heard as a structure of sound, and in most poems those sounds are more or less “musical”. Even in a poem that is less musical, the structuring of sound is very important—e.g. many by William Carlos Williams.
I’m an editor (and in my own writing) who thinks that musicality is a very powerful device for achieving the kind of aesthetic experience that poetry provides. Luckily, a good variety of musical sound structures has been invented by poets.
Historically, I take it that Pound was right in finding the taproot of modern Western poetry in the line of lyrical poems that features early inventions by Sappho and Catullus. And includes the troubadours. In earlier periods, many poems were written to be sung or recited, with instrumental accompaniment. Even in more recent centuries, that lyrical tradition has been kept alive in folksong and pop, and until my parents’ generation (born in the 19-teens), large numbers of Americans memorized and recited poetry, emphasizing musicality and other sound flourishes, in school and home.
My musical taste, which probably influences my editorial selection, like that of so many writers and readers even today, began being formed by the Elizabethans (in my case, at the last moment when, in American education, English lit was considered to be far better and important than American lit). Actually my earliest memories of being knocked over by musicality in poetry are of reciting “The Night Before Christmas, at about 5, and of reading Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” at 11 or 12). In college I added, in a raggedy-andy way, the music or Hopkins, Aiken, Cummings, Marvel, Keats, and particular poems by Romantics and Victorians, etc., and the Beats out of class; and in grad school, Chaucer in his Middle English, Poe, Dickinson and Whitman, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens, etc etc, along with certain poems in French, German, and Russian—although I was not a fluent speaker of those languages; and then at last, as I completed grad courses and struggled on into my early years of teaching (the ‘60s), the music of many contemporary American voices, including Plath, O’Hara, and African American poets such as Hughes and Baraka (and of course the blues). (And the music in the prose of many American and British novels.) Well this has become a ridiculous paragraph, because there are simply way too many to name—but I hope this gives a sense of where I’m coming from, in my mind’s ear or my ear’s brain, when I’m reading submissions.
I do believe, with Pound, that poets should train their souls (maybe that’s Poe) to the best of what has been accomplished, and strive to add something of their own that is as good—and is right for the particular poem. And that includes musicality.
I’ll move on, to two of the major musical devices, rhyme and rhythm—and just a bit about sound in the creative process. [I’m working on what I want to say about these.]
Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press