This is kind of how music looks in my mind.
And I hear myself say this all the time:
“The key to creative freedom is structure.”
I don’t mean structure imposed from outside – but internal structure. Like bones. Like an arc.
I ‘get’ how structure works with music – but for words alone I haven’t found a parallel.
I see it clearly with music: music rides on a pulse of time through shifts of emotional color. The emotional color – harmony – gives meaning words or the unspeakable sub-words that are musical phrase – and this reveals and expresses human experience.
It’s simple. Music rides the wave of time… and takes you on that ride.
If you jump on that wave, you can play with it. Making time into music refracts it into an arc – not a single arc, like a rainbow – but infinitely reshapeable – an arc made of infinite arcs.
Music rides the wave of time ... and takes you on that ride. Click To TweetYou can play with that arc – embellish it, reshape it, spin other arcs off of it – yet each seed or musical idea has its own undefinable shape in the ether. It fully exists without any shape or definition.
Now that I’m actually trying to describe it – I can see it and feel it, but don’t feel I’m explaining it fully. I only know that exploring the shape of music is an endless delight – as if you could reach out and grab arcs out of the air.
You can, actually.
Every song I’ve ever heard – or never heard yet – every melodic fragment – exists as an arc for infinite play.
So what about writing? I wish I had, for writing, that understanding of structure and play that I have for music.
But it just occurred to me …
Occurring like a cur – a dog – with infinitely playful spirit
A dog whose nose is an emissary
A nose that created dog to ferry it through the world …
That prose is not poetry
Is prose to explain – and poetry to play?
Because there’s no EXPLAINING in music. You PLAY it. It PLAYS you. It IS play.
The playing OUT
The playing IN
Playing WITH
Is poetry music without the sound? Poets – tell me!
Is poetry music without the sound? Poets – tell me! Click To TweetAnd if so – what is its arc?
How do you play it?
Need to know when you come to Europe and where ….hopefully near Hamburg in Germany….Mary Schmidt..Germanyq
Need to know when you are coming to Europe….hopefully to Germany
…and hopefully to Hamburg….please let me know……maybe you will be giving workshops too……whau….that would be a dream come true…. 🙂
Mary Schmidt
Germany
Saw your post on LinkedIn because a connection of mine commented on it, but I wanted to read the full blog post, so I’m commenting here instead.
I found your writing very interesting, mostly because of the way you describe how you “play” music and how it “plays” you. This is how I feel about my poetry.
While you can differentiate structural aspects between music and poetry (as I saw many people did in their comments), the relationship you have with making music, is the relationship I have with making poetry. I play with this arc – feeling it and seeing it in my own mind.
Now, the part I want to learn and the part I am struggling with, is how do I turn my poetry into music?
Thank you for the post.
Thank you for your comment! So interesting to hear that it is a struggle for you to turn words into music as it is for me to find a way to ‘explore’ a theme in language.