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“Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.” — Ezra Pound
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ou cannot just hear a poetry comic.You have to look at it to experience it. But even poetry is virtually defined by its visual construction on the page: line breaks, stanzas, white space. And one could argue that there is a music in the visual absence of words/image.The white space needed to construct breath is where music is formed — like bread is made of air, of nothing, of absence — so sound is made. Sound, sense, words, and images in poetry are competing factions that create a singular symphony. It’s much like “biophony,” soundscape ecology, the phenomena of orchestration in nature: birds each singing their own song, and yet somehow creating a single harmonious movement of sound that works together; a spontaneous, deliberate, intuitive orchestra. Here, I have chosen a poem by my husband, the poet Ben Pease, which also deals in subject with music. In “Silent Swan,” the speaker, while watching his mother die in hospice, feels the automatic, primitive desire to sing. Instead, grief is expressed in the possibility of music. He is mute by the loss. “Silent Swan” wrestles with the craft of poetry: there is actual singing, but an internal, subsonic, more holy song, hidden in plain sight. The senses are more intricately linked and immutable than we are raised to believe. Music and words and images are at their most complex, most evolutionary, in poetry. I attempt the literal image to complicate it. I see music in images, as in poetry. Bianca Stone April 10, 2016
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the massachusetts review winter 2016 printed by the studley press, dalton, massachusetts