Gary
The Power of Lyric: How Does Music Inform Contemporary Poetry?
In a 2007 interview, Bruce Smith, a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and National Book Award Finalist, explained his poetry’s aspiration to song. To Smith, poetry is “language torqued, broken, ruined in a way for it to become your own”, a type of broken music arranged on the page, imbued with cadence and rhythms that communicates with our very humanity. Demonstrated by enjambments, forms, and cadences, the music of poetry is equally significant and tangible in comparison to the text of the poem. As poetry and its inseparable music evolved in the past 100 years, the concept of poetry as the preeminent form of literature no longer persists; however, contemporary poetry today continues to embody our innate emotions and delicate humanity in its modernized, unconventional forms.
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In a 2007 interview, Bruce Smith, a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and National Book Award Finalist, explained his poetry’s aspiration to song. To Smith, poetry is “language torqued, broken, ruined in a way for it to become your own”, a type of broken music arranged on the page, imbued with cadence and rhythms that communicates with our very humanity. Demonstrated by enjambments, forms, and cadences, the music of poetry is equally significant and tangible in comparison to the text of the poem. As poetry and its inseparable music evolved in the past 100 years, the concept of poetry as the preeminent form of literature no longer persists; however, contemporary poetry today continues to embody our innate emotions and delicate humanity in its modernized, unconventional forms.
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