How Avid Music Listening Taught Me the Fundamentals of Poetry
Think of music being the soundtrack to your writing.
If you ask me, mindful music listening should be a mandatory requirement in all writing classes; be it primary, secondary, or at university level. This is how I learned to write poetry, but, for me, it wasn’t a linear process. Most of this sacred work is subconscious before it ever moves to the conscious level, and this could take years, maybe a decade or more. But it will happen naturally, organically.
My first introduction to purposeful music listening began in 1985, when I was eleven. Listening to music helped to ease the boredom of my super long bus ride to attend a faraway private Christian Academy while all my friends attended nearby Saint Anselm’s. One of the first songs I’d listen to on my brother’s now relic walkman was “Party All the Time” by Eddie Murphy, sung in high falsetto. When I recently watched the video for Murphy’s song, I noticed Rick James behind the mixing table cosplaying a future Dr Dre with his newfound prodigy — Eddie Murphy, instead of Eminem.
When I met my sister’s first husband, at the time a staff writer for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, somewhere between ‘81 and ‘82, I’d coyly whisper that I knew a song, and then proceeded to sing “Super Freak” to his utter shock. He thought I was going to sing “Jesus Loves Me” or “My Little Sunshine” — a song more suitable for a young, innocent child, but instead got: “I’m a very kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to M-u-t-h-a.” This is what happens when you’re the youngest of seven with three, six, eleven, twelve, and eighteen year age gaps, respectively, between siblings — spread out like lone Iowa Silos standing in fields of gold — chalking it up to exposure and influence.
To be fair, I could’ve heard “Super Freak” during our Fundie-Footloose-style church’s random Family Skate Night — because a family that skates together stays together, when a devilish DJ — perhaps on a dare; perhaps on a whim, or perhaps for his own amusement, would sneak in Rick Jame’s megahit between Amy Grant and the Hokey Pokey. I still remember my little Pez-head bobbing around the roller rink to the funkiest of beats. They don’t make songs like that anymore. Now, it’s just a hodgepodge of soulless autotune mixes and formulaic pop hits with very little substance.
Somewhere in the late eighties to early nineties my taste in music got more eclectic, less mainstream. It began with a video on VH-1, a song by a brand new artist with flaming red hair and a “funny lip shape,” a song called “Silent All These Years.” I was sitting alone in my family room, mesmerized by the lyrics and quirky, ethereal beauty of its singer — Tori Amos. The next day, I’d run to Sam Goody to pick up her new LP — Little Earthquakes.
I had this whole, lyric-reading CD ritual thing going on that included spreading my body across my brass and ivory daybed — flat on my stomach, reading lyrical line by lyrical line to each one of her songs in absolute awe.
To provide some context, we had just gone through a decade of the video vixen — the Barbarella of big hair, stiletto-weapons, and Hoochie Mama short skirts. It was a time on the continuum where we celebrated misogyny, hedonism, and gaudy decadence. The main offenders were mostly glamorous hair-metal bands of yesteryear that included White Snake’s Tawny Kitaen video tetralogy, Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” and Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me,” to name a few.
We can collectively thank Nirvana for the rapid extinction of the ’80s video vixen and their hair-metal counterpart. It only took a few Kryptonite-riffs of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to change the direction of music entirely. Nirvana’s masterpiece Nevermind would come out almost four months before Amos’ Little Earthquakes, and I was totally there for it.
This is when I started to pay close attention to the lyrics, studying each line of my favorite songs, picking up patterns. Some of my favorite lyrics belong to Tori Amos, Counting Crows, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, Tom Waits, Ani DiFranco, Radiohead, and even nineties hip hop OG(s) such as Tupac, Biggie, Dr Dre, and later, Eminem.
I couldn’t stand Springsteen until I took a Contemporary American Literary class in 1998, where we studied his music along with Muddy Waters and Dylan. Afterwards, I developed a deep appreciation for his music and, of course, his lyrics.
Good poetry has duality and wordplay, a layering aspect. You see this pattern a lot in Eminem’s music like in his song “When I’m Gone,” when he spits:
“Have you ever loved someone so much, you’d give an arm for?
Not the expression, no, literally give an arm for”
Arm, here, has both wordplay and duality. This same pattern is in “Mr Jones” by Counting Crows from one of my all time favorite albums — August and Everything After. In fact, I would recommend a complete study of this album, from first to last song; a poetic masterpiece. It’s no wonder that David Letterman made an announcement right before their 1994 debut on his Late Show, holding up their August and Everything After CD to the television audience, declaring: “I’m telling you something, if you don’t have a copy of this, there’s something wrong with you.” I couldn’t agree more.
“In “Mr Jones,” the first single off the album, Duritz belts:
“We all want something beautiful / Man I wish I was beautiful”
Beautiful, here, is referred to twice in this line just like in Eminem’s “When I’m Gone,” when he uses arm twice.
And again in “Anna Begins,” this time with the word “changing.” I loved this line so much that I made it the epigraph of my debut book. It’s kind of a nod to Heraclitus.
“Oh,” she says, “You’re changing.” / But we’re always changing.
In the poem “Of Mice, Of Men, Of Chickens,” the word “break” has double meaning — the physical and the metaphysical breaking.
I come from a long line
of women who can break
a man’s heart
and a chicken’s neck.
In my 2009 poem, “The Northerners,” which is included in my debut Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound, I use deer / dear as both word play and duality.
Another tool I learned from mindful music listening is the importance of poetic flow and rhythm, which is a top skill in hip hop: Here’s an excerpt from my poem:
Even our neighbors
were shiny and new —
at first; and at first,
we were open,
taking them up on their
generous invitations
of summer-fun BBQs,
and southern fish fries;
you in the center of hunters,
fishermen, men who liked
to work with their hands —
a man’s man: the kind
my father respected,
and took at their word.How uncomfortable
you looked standing there,
holding a cold Sam Adams,
bobbing your head
in agreement
on the art of deer hunting,
aware your dear wife
loved animals;
how I covered my eyes
as we drove by
their broken,
awkwardly-bent carcasses
strewn on the side of roads.
Here’s another example of some serious word-flow from Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg’s “Nuthin But A “G” Thang.”
You never know, she could be earning her man and learning her man
And at the same time burning her man
I love this line in “Gimme the Loot” by The Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie:
Treat it like boxing, stick and move, stick and move
And then there’s Jewel’s Who Will Save Your Soul:
“There are addictions to feed, and mouths to pay.”
I would take notice of how Jewel switched that line around. I mean it probably should have read “There are addictions to pay and mouths to feed” but the literary impact is far greater when switched, even though it’s illogical when read.
In Fiona Apple’s song “Limp,” off of her 1999 album When the Pawn…,notice the beat of the line. Bukowski once said in an interview a few years before his death that writing should never be boring, that it should make the reader want to turn the page — each line should have what he called “juice.” He even called the beat of the line “Bim, Bim, Bim / Bim, Bim, Bim.” Here, Apple does just that. And it’s a pattern that I also incorporate in my own writing as well.
You fondle my trigger, then you blame my gun.
From my poem “High Anxiety,” included in my first book — Before the Bang Makes a Sound:
A heart grown tired of its chronic techno house beat.
It took me years before I became aware of the strong connection between music listening and writing. Stephen King was quoted for saying this about writing: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” From what I’ve read over the years about King, he’s supposedly an avid music listener, himself, and even played in a band for a time. His poet-wife, Tabitha, once threatened to leave King after he played “Mambo №5”on repeat. Could you blame her?
Music is immediate and accessible. It can comfort, soothe, rally the soul, and even teach and guide. Something fantastic happens when music and writing harmonize. That’s when a poem, or story, writes itself — stream of consciousness.
