an interview with Jeanette Lynes

This interview took place electronically in august, 2002.

CV2: What role does music currently play in your writing? Have you or do you have any aspirations to put your poetic voice to music? If you have, what did you feel music gave to your words? If this is something you haven't done but would like to, what do you imagine music would give to your work, that traditional reading would not?

If I can't be a rock star, I'd love to be a sound poet (like the incredible poets on the "Carnivocal" CD). "Become sound poet" is on my "to do" list. The sound of my poems is really important to me. I'm pretty aware of the measure in my writing and though I'm not really the techy type, I'll often count out iambic beats and so on. But I don't let the number of iambic or trochaic (or whatever feet) drive the poem as much as the emotional torque I'm always hoping comes through. I'm not ready to give up the lyric. I've dabbled with reading some of my poems with this synthesizer thingy a couple of guys in Halifax have, and it was fun. It has so far remained in the category of dabbling. I'd love it if someone set one of my poems to music. I wish I'd written "Insensitive," for God's sake!

CV2: Poetry has historically been compared, and is related to the form of song, What would you say is the relationship of music and poetry? What would you say about your own work is particularly musical? If you were to catagorize your poetry as a particular kind of "song" what would you say it was, for example; jazz, country, classical and so on? And why would you say that?

Given poetry's roots in the oral tradition, I'd say the relationship between music and many kinds of poetry remains a close one. Repetition is a key element in music, and perhaps the same case could be made for poetry—I don't mean dull, thudding repetition, of course, but pattern and variation which applies to free verse as much as it does to rhyming verse. We need to hear the poem to experience it. The poem is a sonic event as much as a textual event. As a sonic event, it enters our bodies. As Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux remark, "rhythm is a bodily experience. It's the beat—whether of the conga drum, the bass guitar, or the stressed syllables in a line—that makes us not only listen, but long to dance." I think my own work largely follows the rhythms of vernacular speech. I'm convinced that our everyday conversations have their own musicality. In many ways, I think I'm striving to mimic conversation, so maybe that makes me some kind of discursive karaoke artist.