Poets are Musicians, and Nobody Can Read Music Anymore
I’ve noticed a stark difference in the reactions of my friends to my poems, depending on how I share them. When I share just the text of a poem, they hardly react. “That’s interesting…” and rarely “I don’t think I know how to read poetry”. The poem might as well be a recipe for a salad, they derive so little enjoyment from it. On the other hand, when I recite the same poem out loud, they’re spellbound.
Is the explanation that I understand my words better than others do? It probably helps: I vary the dynamics and tempo and tone to convey my meaning more fully. However, I’m careful about my choice of words. Verbal scaffolding is nice, but should be unnecessary. This is consistent with my observation that friends who are experienced with poetry do enjoy reading just the text.
Alexander Wales gave a talk at Inkhaven about finding your authorial voice. He mentioned that some authors’ voices are unclear to him until he’s heard their literal voice. I asked if I should optimize my prose to make my voice clear from the text alone, or if I should provide audio recordings for users that might be confused. He suggested that it can be good to record yourself and listen back, to identify how your writing habits (e.g. placement of commas) are at odds with a reader’s natural flow. But also that voice should be clear from text alone.
I don’t think this applies to poetry. Metered poetry is a kind of music, and most people lack the skill to play it back. This isn’t recoverable by rewriting a poem, unless you turn it into something other than a poem. An analogy helps: there’s no way for me to rewrite piano sheet music such that a non-musician will suddenly be able to play the piano. When a reader can’t sing a poem internally as they read it, they render it instead as a kind of stilted prose. A wilted salad.
When I read poetry aloud for others, I’m working as a musician to build them a minimal scaffold. It’s no surprise that the most popular contemporary poets are musicians in the usual sense. Poetry without accompaniment may still be music, but as much as the poet can embed the words in a tapestry of rhythmic and harmonic cues, beeping and buzzing and drumming and swooping and warping and fading, the words become woven more strongly with the listener’s expectations. There are many modern poets, easy to discover, who provide such rich scaffolds for their listeners. So why would they learn to generate them for themselves?
In the past, the social center of a tavern or living room was not a television or a gaming console but a piano, or some chairs in which a family could sit together and sing. People scaffolded their feelings off the generative skill of their friends, and this bonded them. It’s some catastrophe that we’ve replaced that with the wonder of Spotify.
Taylor Swift is not your friend, no matter how well you can drape your feelings over her excellent scaffolds. Can you imagine how much better it would be if you were one of Taylor’s hundred-or-two actual friends, and she performed a song for some of you in her living room, rather than standing a hundred meters away, in a massive stadium saturated with the pretense of familiarity? She might make a few mistakes, sleepy and sitting on her couch; the song might not be an exquisitely finessed artifact of modern production technology; but your hearts would be together.1 How can that compare with a subscription to Spotify and a pair of headphones, to satisfy your lonely ears?
Listening to recorded music isn’t bad! I love and perform much of the music I do, because I’ve had access to many recordings. I wouldn’t deprive anyone of that. But we’ve given up much of our local capacity for generation and sharing to a distant “generative elite”, who by their all-satisfying, all-purpose scaffolds, reduce human experience to the dissemination of simulacra. Their situation is not your situation. Their context is at best a generalization of your context. And as AI gets better at generating art, the simulation reaches its apex: there might be no conscious experience behind the generator at all.
Others have said similar things before, of course. And there are caveats. Some communities have maintained a current of musicianship and storytelling. Content generation hasn’t simply disappeared, or even become particularly uncommon. But it has dissipated into a thousand distant, low-attention modes, on TikTok and YouTube and Minecraft and whatever. Some of this is genuinely useful and good; we might lump 3blue1brown into the generative elite, but his videos don’t serve specifically as depersonalized substitutes for bonding.
I’m pointing at the pervasive loss of the musico-linguistic skill that is one of the greatest tools we had for community building and storytelling.
I don’t think there’s an easy way to fix this. Youth is the best time to train our powers of generation, and it depends on adults who are good generators themselves. Instead, we’ve been happy to let all of that drain away as we become gradually more dependent on distant motions and generic feelings. Still, there are two things I will say: if you want to be a poet, you must learn to be a musician, even if you never pick up an instrument. And if you want to build magical communities with your actual friends and family, you should be at least a little uncomfortable about Taylor Swift.
I have personal experience. There’s a little magic in the room when I play for friends, even when I’m playing poorly. No such magic with Spotify.
This reminded me of a line I read in 'Rhyme's Reason' by John Hollander: " In former times, the region of verse was like an inviting, safe municipal park, in which one could play and wander at will. Today, only a narrow border of that park is frequently used (and vandalized), out of fear that there is safety only in that crowded strip— even as the users' grandparents would cling to walks that went by statues—and out of ignorance of landscape. The beauties of the rest of that park are there, unexplored save by some scholars and often abandoned even by them.
I am old enough to have grown up in the park, and to map a region one loves is a way of caressing it. (Goethe wrote of counting out hexameters on his Roman lady's back as she lay in his arms: he was mapping her body's' curve even as he felt for the ancient rhythm.) I too set out now as a loving rather than merely dutiful tour guide. Even today, when touch seems casual and only discourse intimate, one can't presume on Whitmanic relations with readers."
That said, I think your musical note analogy is much more interesting than the map analogy of Hollander. There is a kind of wonderful untranslatability/incompressibility of verse poetry. I believe the Romantics thought the same about metaphors: never reducible to the rote description of their subject.