music on the page?

I’ve been sitting all week with this question of poetry being the baseline (or bassline, even) of music. Folks are always saying crap like “poetry is the music of the soul,” and I’m always left wondering, What the hell does that mean? I guess I’ve written it off for years, this connection between music and poetry. I’m a big radio addict & I often find myself reaffirming the thick distinction I’ve made between the two while listening to simple rhymes being fed over really tight beats or beautiful acoustics. The music is what makes it good, I think, the voices. Also the cheap lyrics, like any good guilty pleasure, mostly because our country is so perpetually stifled emotionally that hearing Miley Cyrus sing “it’s the climb” on the radio could actually make someone feel good & motivated. It’s fascinating; wonderful & totally bizarre.

As I’m reading Bum Rush & Aloud, I’m wondering how or why music matters to the page. I love music & I love poetry. I understand that they share many important characteristics (rhythm, expression, emotion), but I’m not entirely sure the value in trying to enforce one on the other. There are some really good lyrics that make terrible songs & really great musical analogies in poems that in turn just suck the life out of it.

So what about spoken word? Or rap? I think both take the best parts of musical elements and the best parts of accessible poetic language, turn each on their head, and explode. Jessica & Eboni are asking questions about access versus message & I think it’s really important that these two are tied. In music, I think the message often gets watered down in order to be overly-accessible. In poetry, I think the message gets downplayed (if there even is one) in favor of devices that may or may not prove inaccessible to a reader. In spoken word & rap (and no, I’m not necessarily saying either is “not music”), I think they prioritize the two to an extent where they become a single unit. Accessible message.

How does this happen? I think a lot of it has to do with the spoken voice & not the singing voice. There is authority in spoken language, a different level of seriousness. It’s easy to go to a show & talk over the musician. We all know what background music is like, especially in a coffee shop or at a small venue where the opener isn’t well-known. But when folks get on a mic and start talking, people listen. Isn’t that strange? Maybe it’s our upbringing in America, where we are taught to be quiet when the person with authority in the room is speaking. Loudspeakers, news television, radio, classrooms, speeches, dialogue on teevee programs. It’s easy to talk or think or work while someone is playing music, but the second a spoken word or rap album shuffles onto my ipod while I’m doing homework, I have to skip it because I can’t focus with someone else talking. I think this is really interesting & would love to hear what other folks’ experiences of this are.

Back to the poems themselves. I really love “Owed to Eminem” & love even more that I got to the end and found out it was written by June Jordan. Bam! I hope somebody writes about it because there’s so much to unpack there.

I want to talk about “Conversation with Duke Ellington & Louis (Pops) Armstrong” in BumRush. Lucca does a fantastic job here of invoking music on the page. It’s possible not because there are specific rhythmic elements at play, but because there is a reference in that first stanza that knocks the pendulum on the entire poem, making it sway back and forth through to the end. Lucca writes “the clarinet and who/ does mean a thing / ‘case she’s got that swing.” Plenty of folks know that song & what the poem is riffing off in that moment. The question of access is a small one here, simply because the song (Ella Fitzgerald’s “It Don’t Mean A Thing”) has been so mainstreamed in jazz and hiphop circles that it’s a little unavoidable to have that strike a chord. The placement of the “doo wops” and the fact that they are imbedded in the stanzas, also moves the poem in ways that others in the section can’t seem to manage (like “Bebop Trumpet”). The spacing of the rhyme also mimics that of a jazz song, pushing back and forth between artists with a feminist in the middle.

“Bebop Trumpet,” on the other hand, is a really tight list of musical allusions, but with no real musical affect. There isn’t a moment in this poem where I feel a hook, anything to latch onto. I don’t think this makes it a bad poem, but I wonder – as I did with many in this section – why it is included. Simply for the topic? Or is there more I’m missing than co-opted lyrics?

I had the same question when I got to “The Creed of a Graffiti Writer,” a totally badass poem that I hope Rojas has taken to many, many stages. This poem belongs on the mic. It needs to be heard aloud. And while it shares rhythmic qualities with particular kinds of music, I don’t consider this to be a musical poem. The rhythm & the rhyme, the accents and the metered motion definitely make this poem come alive (another point of access). Would I call it music? Nope.

Also, I’m really thankful to whomever sent out this link. Thanks!