Amiri Baraka was a way in. There’s something to be said also for the Beat poets. There was this one passage in Invisible Man about smoking marijuana and listening to Louis Armstrong and how the blues is both a riot and old lady. Then there was this album of Charles Mingus’ music set to Langston Hughes. Writing about music. Or just writing musically. Writing music poetically. As human art is the synapses connecting constellations, then it was bound to happen. It’s difficult to talk about. The connection is inevitably there. But is it just something we see in the toast? Or should I say, something we hear in the toast?
The connection between poetry and music is, in all sincerity, tenuous. Sure, there’s spoken word, which is making poetry musically. But then again, most poets set themselves apart from the spoken word crowd. And it’s true, the two are almost different art forms. The quiet Dickenson ideal of the inward poem hardly belongs in a crowded club in Manhattan. And the poems that have the pretense of being musical, often fall short from seeming so. And yet, humans will inevitably here rhythm in the line. And poets, too, often write with only a rhythm or flow of syllables and strong beats and soft, passing beats and the way a line begins and the way you come up off it, and so, you see, we get to talking as if this is a jazz solo. I know lately, I’ve been writing poems with a sort of incantation behind me, not worrying so much about how my voice may seem in the poem to others.
So I reached out to Marcus Amaker, a local poet known for his perfomative style, who showed interest in setting down some recordings. I plan to keep it casual and relatively low-fi. I plan to play drums behind him reading certain poems I find musical. I want it unambitious in this one way, you see, keeping the musical and recording side simple. This way I can really have an entry point between music and poetry. To be honest I’ve done both for so many years and yet I’ve had all kinds of pretenses about combining the two. Ultimately, this is a crucial healing of my two selves, and a bold experiment. Will they hold water?