All One Thing: How Do You Tell the Difference Between Poetry and Music?

Guest blogger, Molly Tenenbaum

Because I’m a poet and musician (old-time music; banjo, fiddle, guitar), people ask if the two arts connect for me. Actually, musicians don’t ask, poets do. After all, at parties, the poets must converse, while the musicians take their instruments into a room where they do something rhythmic and exciting together, emerging flushed in the face hours later.

So, first answer: There’s not much connection. Although poets and musicians both drink either beer or wine, they attend separate parties, each group intensely nerdy about their own endless art.

Second answer: They’re the same.

Strangeness is one element I love in both: “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” one of my early, nursery-school influences. My Michael never did arrive, always far, rowing, striving—or perhaps peacefully dabbling, not wanting to come in—alone on the dips and flashes of the water. Despite knowing about the song’s origins as a slave spiritual, I still carry my own Michael, a version of me; someone calls to me, calls three times; and I still don’t know if I am able to arrive or answer.

Other early musical poems and poetic music for me were Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Counting-out Rhyme”—the beautiful ls and ws, the trees whispering together—and Ariel’s song, “Where the Bee Sucks, there Suck I,” with its dream of flitting and sipping. I loved the leap of the word “Merrily”—now I know it reverses the iambic stress pattern—but then I just wanted to say it over and over again.

What about now, in my adult life as poet and musician?

In traditional music, passed down, appearing as if by Anonymous, we lose original context, transitions, introductions. I want to write a poem that sounds as distilled.

Many fiddle tunes, while not songs, have lines of words threading through—“Shout Lulu, shout, shout, what in the world you shouting about,” “John Brown dreamed the devil was dead.” The words come from nowhere, from the wild yonder, weaving like a straw floating on water into the waves of these roaring dance tunes. The words almost disappear, become syllables and half images. I think I use that in poetry. Somehow.

I love traditional music’s floating verses—verses that appear in many different songs. Stanley Kunitz said, if I remember right, that we’re always writing the same poem, or come back to the same poem over and over.

My music—4 beats, 32-bars—might be a handicap to my poetic line.

I know what it’s like to play a tune and feel it float up into the stars, to float with it, to be in a constellation with all the other times through history people have played the same tune. I know what it’s like to make something that disappears the moment you set it in the air and yet lives and sings inside you all the time.

Poetry/music: I always have to stop doing one because I want to do the other, but then I’m longing for what I’ve left. And yet, what better life could there be?

Molly Tenenbaum is the author of The Cupboard Artist (forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press, 2011), Now (Bear Star Press, 2007) and By a Thread (Van West & Co, 2000). Her work appears in many journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry 1991, Black Warrior Review, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cutbank, The Diagram, Fine Madness, In Posse, Nimrod, The Mississippi Review, New England Review, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Shenandoah, The Southeast Review, Swivel, and Willow Springs, and in webzines including Anti-, Fringe, and Snakeskin. Honors include a Hedgebrook residency and a 2009 Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship. She’s also a musician, playing Appalachian string band music; her CDs are Instead of a Pony and Goose & Gander. She teaches music at home and English at North Seattle Community College.