What do you see as the main connection between language and music? They both express or communicate rhythmic sound but perhaps it’s deeper than that?

Over the past ten years, I’ve learned a great deal about a particular connection between language and music: that is, the crucial role of syntactical rhythm in the way the brain processes both spoken and written language. I talk about this in some detail in The Art of Syntax (Graywolf Press, 2009).

Beyond this constitutional similarity, poetry has other connections to music as well, especially if you think of music as not just sounds but as an architecture. And I try to analyze this also in the book. The main thing to remember, though, is that while there are resemblances, there are also huge differences between the two; even if poems “aspire to the condition of music,” as Walter Pater put it, they are in language, and the rhythmic elements of pitch and duration, for instance, are much more variable, less easily quantified.

In your book of essays, The Flexible Lyric, there is a complex discussion on the grammatical and syntactic structures of poems. You have also been quoted as saying that you write your own poems “mainly by ear,” writing by sound first and then going back to see what was said. Is creating a poem, then, first expressing what wells up from a place of deep conception in the writer’s mind then going back and shaping it linguistically?

I’m suspicious of many of these particular terms, like “wells up” and “conception” and even “expressing,” which seems to me quite different from making/creating, and I am especially wary of the two-step division which posits conception/expression FOLLOWED BY shape/language. For me, a poem is more like a lens one grinds and cleans, grinds and cleans, in order to see the world. An act of discovery. Frost talks somewhere about a poem being initiated by something seen in the peripheral vision — and of course he’s famous for saying a poem needs to “ride on its melting,” like ice on a hot stove. The great glory of poetry is that it requires — first from the poet, then from the reader — both sides of the brain, working in concert, the rational and the irrational parts, the modules that manage lexicon and those that manage dance.

Any poem can start anywhere, in any module, but what one hopes is that it will very quickly stimulate all the others. I have always composed in lines, and for me, the only trigger that leads anywhere is the apprehension of a sort of paradigmatic line. Yeats, on the other hand, could and did start with a sort of prose note, summarizing a dramatic situation that intrigued him (i.e., old man in a schoolroom surrounded by children); what seemed to jumpstart these extremely reductive journal entries was auditioning, and then settling on, a rhyme scheme. What often came late, or even last, was a surprising rearrangement of the stanzas (take a look at the changes he made in “The Wild Swans at Coole”) — and as a result, an entirely different structure, one that feels inevitable to us as readers, but was not available to the poet prior to the “arrangement of language” in rhymed, metered lines.