We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program to Talk About Poetry: An Apology and a Defense

In my ambitious bid to listen to every record in my collection from A to Z and to write a poem about each artist in the process, I am learning something new about poetry. First of all, writing a “good” poem “in response to a thing,” especially on the fly, is difficult or impossible to do. What we typically call “ekphrastic” poetry, poems written in response to or inspired by some other kind of art, takes time, takes rumination, takes a kind of discipline to sit with the subject for a time, possibly even years, before discovering what it is that one might have to say, or avenues that might be explored in response to this other work of art. A “good” poem is always something more than pure description. So, sadly, what I find myself doing in these “poem-like-things” about the musical artists I listen to is mostly pure description with autobiographical musings about when and how I came across these records. Every once in a while there will be an interesting association or some playful or musical use of language, but for the most part these pieces are not very “poetic,” whatever that means. They are not really poems, but rather, short essays organized on the page in short lines arranged in long, skinny stanzas. I make this kind of apology here, perhaps, as a self serving way of saying that I know what poetry is, and I know that this ain’t it. Or rather, I have a sense of when I’ve written a “good” poem, and these things, while I’ve liked some of them and have enjoyed writing them, do not seem to me especially “good” as poetry. Why not compose these things in paragraphs, then? I don’t know. At some point, I might transition into that, but I’m kind of a stickler for consistency and continuity, and that would wreak havoc on both. For now, I like the idea of a skinny looking essay. I think it’s easy on the eyes. I also like the “idea” of writing poems in response to music, so if I keep doing these, from time to time I may stumble onto something like an actual poem. Meanwhile, I’ll keep on with this for as long as I can. Approaching the end of the B’s maybe in the next weeks or so, and looking at my collection, I think I might be something like a 10th of the way through the project.