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 sometimes “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 reading 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 form a gestalt that conveys my intended meaning more fully than mere text might. However, I’m pretty careful about my choice of words, and I do think they can convey the meaning I want on their own. Extra verbal scaffolding is nice, but should be unnecessary. This is consistent with my observation that some of my friends who are more experienced with poetry don’t have the same issues when reading the text of my poems for themselves.
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 whether I should try to optimize my writing (not poetry) to make my voice clear from the text alone, or if I should also 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 the natural recitative a reader might follow. However, he also said that I should aim for a clear textual voice, without the reader needing aids.
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 perhaps 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 as a kind of stilted prose instead. It deflates like 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 most poets these days are musicians in the usual sense. Poetry without accompaniment may still be music, but as many rhythmic and harmonic cues as the poet can provide, beeping and buzzing and drumming and swooping and warping and fading, all the more legible and culture-anchored the poetry becomes. And since modern listeners can easily discover modern poets that will provide such rich scaffolds for them, why would they ever learn that skill 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 and sing together. People scaffolded their feelings off the generative skill of their friends, and this bonded them. It’s some catastrophe that we’ve mostly 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 bunch of little mistakes playing, sleepy and sitting on her couch; the song might not be a beautifully finessed artifact of modern production technology; but your hearts would be together.1 It’s absurd to compare that 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 a wide range of recordings. I wouldn’t think to 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 the all-satisfying fullness of their all-purpose scaffolds, can 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, there might be no conscious experience behind the generator at all.
Others have said similar things before, of course. And there are caveats. 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 losses of the musico-linguistic skills that are some of the greatest tools for community building and storytelling. (I’m not reactionary in any more general sense, and honestly it feels rather odd to be saying this, as a rather more cosmopolitan-minded person than most.)
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 distant feelings. But 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 a musical 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.