Dear friends,
Your rhyming lines last week were a delight to read. The ways those musics have remained with you is contagious, and I’m sure plenty of us were repeating your shared lines to ourselves while reading the comments.
Musics. Yes, I meant that. Fifteen years ago, I met an extraordinary man, Paul Aleu Dau, who had survived being one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. For a number of years, moving from refugee camp to refugee camp and sometimes fleeing from attacking militia, he found sustenance in church services. When he settled in Australia, he pursued ordination. I asked him what had drawn him to those services in the camps. He, fluent in multiple languages, looked at me, paused, and said, “The musics.” It was deliberate. I have never forgotten it.
Music in poetry is a variety of metre (or meter, depending on your Englishes). And any metre recalls the sensory memory of the heartbeat: what we felt in the womb, what we hear and/or feel in our own bodies after exertion or shock or fear. In her “Alaskan poems you didn’t write”, Kimberly Blaser asks, “What is meter but another word for memory?” (from her book Ancient Light). I love that question, how she enters through the door of literature and opens to a spacious question about the human condition.
Music, metre, memory. Heartbeat, feeling, bodies. This may explain why music and poetry are so elemental to all human communities, and why we have found ways to build rhythm — in different cultures and in different ways — to turn to that which was among the first things most of us sensed. Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.
In a poem of religious devotion, written in 1623, John Donne projects a re-joining of the person and music into the hereafter (you can read the full poem here):
Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.A friend of mine was at a New Year’s gig in Dublin, back in the 1990s. Sinéad O’Connor was one of the musicians singing as part of a cornucopia of instrumentalists and vocalists on stage. As the instruments built up a crescendo, Sinéad held a long, steady solid note, eyes closed, no vibrato, just a music that was in the now and the now and the now and the now. My friend stood, arms outstretched — to life, to death, to the universe, to its expansion and collapse — and let the music do in him what it was doing in him. I wasn’t there, but I feel like I was. In this way, music is another kind of memory too: a shared one.
And another time, freshly back in Ireland after having lived in Australia for four years, I decided I was finally going to join a poetry recital group. I went, fresh and green and nervous, but determined that I needed to put my name in the hat to read. That night, a Canadian woman read a beautiful poem, in which she detailed how sometimes she sets a kettle on a low heat overnight on a wood-fired stove and and places lavender the water, so that when she rises early the next morning the house will smell of that soft, woody aroma. Her poem was music to me then, and it still is. I have no idea who she was — I think she was just in Ireland on a holiday and joined an open-mic poetry night — but I have remembered the content and recitation of her words for over 20 years.
Two years ago, I saw a video of children playing on a makeshift seesaw in Gaza, a beam balanced on bricks. Up-down. Up-down. A kind of music with their movement and bodies. Mohamed Abu al-Qosman, who was 14 at the time, entertained the other children with a drum. It was Eid. “As you can see,” he said, “children are playing on the rubble and rocks. I’m entertaining them.”
O God — the places music goes, the things we ask it to do, and the things it gives us.
So, building on the rhyme of last week, here’s the question for this week: Where has music found you? And what did it give you in that moment?
Poetry in the World
A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Notre Dame, IN; Cambridge, MA; Manhattan and Rhinebeck, NY; Santa Fe, NM) and Scotland (Iona)
I’ll be giving the keynote for a symposium at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
April 29, Cambridge, Massachusetts
I’ll be reading a few poems from Kitchen Hymns and joining Bishop Julia Whitworth for a conversation at Christ Church Cambridge, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
For those of you in New York City: Join poet, playwright, and actress Amanda Quaid and myself for a live recording of Poetry Unbound In Conversation at The Morgan Library & Museum, beginning at 6 p.m. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
May 31–June 5, Rhinebeck, New York
This spring, I’m leading a six-day workshop at the Omega Institute. We’ll read and examine poems and also write and discuss our own. I’d love to see you there. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
June 27–July 3, Iona, Scotland
Krista and I will be leading a week of conversation (with some musical guests) on Iona, an island off an island off the west coast of Scotland. It is filled, but if you want to be on the wait list, you can email the Saint Columba hotel by clicking on the title just above here. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico
I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)
I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
I was in 7th grade, in the early 90s, where teaching was dictation and frontal. We were about to experience something different in Mr. Hanganu's Geography lesson. He entered the classroom with his usual map of the world which he would hang in front of the black board. In his other hand, was holding a cassette player. I do not remember his introduction or the relevance to the topic we were studying, but when he pressed play, John Lennon's Imagine started playing. Many years later, when I became a teacher myself, I finally understood that moment and his desire - or maybe even urge - to give or tell us something important about our role and place in the world. I do not know if he is still alive but I am very grateful that I got to honour his memory today.
I'm in Siena on this Spring morning, far from home, but also in a place that feels like a sort of home. 30 years ago, after our son died and we didn't know how to go on, we came to this beautiful country, this beautiful city. Shortly after, back in our "normal" home, we found Andrea Bocelli and his extraordinary album Romanza. It was the first music we could bear to listen to after our son's death, and we listened to it over and over.
Last night while sipping a glass of wine, I pulled the album up on my phone and played it on our little portable speaker. When the song "Rapsodia" started, we both stilled, transported, brought to new tears, brought back to that time, brought closer to the grief that will always be in our hearts, and to the love.
"Tu, cosi' lontana, seppure ormai cosi' vicino. E l'anima se ne va verso l'eternita''."
Music is both balm to our wounds and a visceral reminder of them. The other beloved Italian singer-- and also song writer/poet-- who has accompanied me during these years is Gianmaria Testa. I am grateful to them both, and to many other musicians (shoutout especially to Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave).
And I'm grateful to so many poets, including Padraig, and to this Sunday morning community.