Quote

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.

Now, one can often get away with playing music by ear when it is not being recorded, but writing is another matter; its mistakes are not forgotten because they are still there to confuse us.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.