is music: Selected Poems

Clichés about the connections between poetry and music are everywhere. For many writers and readers they’re a core belief about what separates the good from the bad; “Musical” and “sonorous” are complimentary descriptions, “sing-songy” isn’t. Poetry began as an oral tradition, we say, something made by the throat for the ear. Only later, the story goes, did the page become poetry’s dominant medium, and one can sometimes sense a blind nostalgia for a by-gone era in the “poetry is music” arguments, if not a blunt rejoinder to Modernism and its many experimental off-shoots. In other words, what are we saying poetry is not by saying poetry is music?

Before I get to how John Taggart tackles this question, let me bring up another poet for whom music was a central concern, Donald Justice.

Because he’d begun his artistic life as a composer and was at one time the star pupil of the great Carl Ruggles, Justice was often asked about the connections between his craft as a poet and his initial training as a musician. The question must have seemed like a softball. Justice, after all, did not write conversational verse. Most of his poems are highly structured, with a vast majority containing rhyme (that “musical” device). Invariably however, Justice answered in the negative, exemplified by the following exchange with Dana Gioia:

Dana Gioia: Did studying music have any effect on your poetry?
Donald Justice: I can’t think of any effect at all. None.

His tone here, and elsewhere, sounds deliberately defiant, borderline annoyed, as if Gioia had asked him if watching TV had impacted his verse. In various places however, including in his collection of prose, Oblivion, Justice reveals a basis for his opinion:

The music of music and the music of poetry are entirely different things. The rhythms of music and the rhythms of poetry have little in common…As for any of the other resources available to the composer—melody, for instance, which requires regulation of pitch—poetry affords no reasonable parallels, except in vague and hardly comparable matters of structure…In the end the music of poetry must be understood as no more than a metaphor struck off in the heat of wishful thought. (79)

I initially read the title of John Taggart’s Selected Poems, is music, as a two-word rejoinder to Justice. Taggart is a master of the phrasal fragment, so in another poet’s hands, the title might have been, This Is Music. But the effect of Taggart’s foreshortening to verb/object is not just a thesis or an evocation of compression; it’s a way to open up the question of language’s relationship to music. “Is music” could be part of either a statement or a question, and it’s representative of the principle unit of Taggart’s poetry—the condensed phrase, learned, most certainly, from reading George Oppen. If this poetry “is music,” then, in musical terms, what are these phrases? Are the words “notes?” If so, could the phrases be chords? But in chords, notes are played simultaneously. Perhaps it’s a measure, though a measure implies tempo—something that can only be approximated on the page. Is the book a gigantic score for the common reader? For Taggart himself? If so, how does the text regulate how we might perform it? Or is the text score and performance at once? As readers, are we merely audience members?

To want to be a saint to want to be a saint to want to
to be snake-tailed with wings to be a snake-tailed saint with
wings to leap upon the horse-headed woman the blue-eyed woman
who chokes the throat to want to be a saint to wake men from nightmare

This stanza—from a poem about John Coltrane appropriately titled “Giant Steps”—is typical of post-1970s Taggart: long lines, lack of punctuation, and an emphasis on anaphora. A poet can only assume one thing about how a reader will digest a poem: beginning with the first word and ending with the last. Within that constraint, Taggart finds ways to make musicians of his readers.

An extreme example is the poem, “Standing Wave.” All six sections of the poem are of equal length, with threads of speech reoccurring in the exact same places in the stanzas. In essence, the stanzas are six slightly different versions of the same poem. By making them sequential and repeating chunks of the same sequences, Taggart makes us reread the poem six times in the way he would like us to read it. And the feeling is even more pronounced when the poem is read aloud; eventually you begin to feel like an instrument conducted by John Taggart.

These accumulations of phrasing create a second effect that I would argue is music. Taggart’s emphasis on repetition sometimes reminds me of a minimalist composer like Terry Riley. Even though the piece, in performance, lasts over an hour, the score for Riley’s “In C” is only one page long. Repetition of the fifty-two “phrases” in “In C” is built into the piece, and they eventually wash over one another like waves arriving simultaneously on shore. By comparison, in a long Taggart poem like “Peace on Earth,” the repetitions begin to echo in one’s memory so that they can feel as if they’re being read simultaneously. The effect isn’t novel in poetry, but it’s typically accomplished with rhyme, or on a much smaller scale, such as in a ghazal.

Taggart takes this “direction” of our reading to an extreme in “The Rothko Chapel Poem.” The piece employs the same rolling anaphora—“Deepened by black red made deep by black”; “rooms of deep red light red deepened by black”—but Taggart also begins to shape the words themselves, breaking them into something like phonemes. So the word “move” becomes “ma-mah-moo-euve-veh.” The smearing (one could argue that Taggart is mimicking Rothko’s brush techniques, though to do so seems to invoke the same kind of slippery metaphors in calling a poem “musical”) is a visual effect as well as a sonic one. Taggart is calling the mouth into the poem. He’s making you say “move” how he wants you to say it—he’s conducting a performance, in other words.

Taggart doesn’t just make the poems music in their structure however; more often than not, the poems are also about music—who made it, how they made, and why. He devotes entire poems to Marvin Gaye, Lester Young, Olivier Messiain, and Sonny Rollins, and enjoys making tangential shout-outs to pop stars like Lionel Richie, Sade, and the Pointer Sisters. His insistence on didacticism uncovers, in the most enjoyable way, the false division between “show and tell.”

For instance, in a blues poem about blues singer James Carr, called, straight-forwardly, “Rhythm &s Blues Singer,” one finds lines like “rhythm = the backbeat of all biological pleasures.” Here and elsewhere, Taggart foregrounds himself as critic at the same time he’s attempting to poetically evoke the structures of the song itself. It’s a decidedly un-musical approach.

As a comparison, think for a second about a high modernist like James Wright and how he maneuvers in order to make rhetorical statements. In his famous poem, “Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” Wright lays one image upon another to form the bucolic picture of a man in a hammock—the first twelve lines are akin to shots in a short film—and only after the landmines of the images have been laid do we delve into the rhetorical voice of his psyche—“I have wasted my life.”

If John Taggart were in that hammock, the poem might sound something like this:

I have wasted my life wasted my life
I have lived a life of waste the wasted life
O to waste a life to live a life of waste
hawk in the sky I a wasted life

As if in a high falutin’ High Fidelity, music is Taggart’s subject, his muse, his structural impulse, his process, and, in the Bloomian sense, his anxiety. And because his voice compels him to talk about what he’s doing while he’s doing it, he can sum his own music up much better than I could ever hope to. This is the end of the last stanza of “Not Quite Parallel Lines”:

I like to write something that people can’t hum
that people can’t hum can’t put entranced hands in
people can’t put entranced hands together in the gaps
can’t put their whole entranced selves in the gaps
one end of the column is larger than the other
the end of the second is wide and beginning of third
I am twisting these conjoined columns of the horn
deforming the horn trying to deform the horn of the voice

By deforming our notions of musicality, Taggart makes a music that stands triumphantly on its own in contemporary American poetry.