Why I Get Called To Poetry

It's hard to put into words what I believe called me to poetry. Ultimately, I think it comes down to the idea of getting things off of your chest that you take as universal truths, and perhaps, in the same gesture, touching someone else. I am not naïve; I won't say I know everything about the world around me, and I'll never claim that. But perhaps there's a few things I can talk about, or things I have personally experienced that can shed some light elsewhere. Or perhaps an idea comes to mind that creates a chain of additional ideas, leading up to the formation of a cohesive idea. That's what happened with one of my other poems, "Again Looking at Cayuga Lake from Atop the Towers." A few non-cohesive ideas lead themselves down a poetic path and formed an idea on loneliness and desire for more, or at least something, from low-hanging clouds I could see from East Tower over the lake.

One other thing that gets me interested in poetry is its application to music. In the same idea, everything is about saying what you need to say the best way you could say it. Be it in pitch class sets, dominant to tonic progressions, tanka poems, or free-verse, there's something to say and a way to say it. Poetry allows me to open up another world in that form of expression. In so doing, it clears up concepts back at music. And vice-versa for music to poetry. Plus, there's the inevitable link of using text in music as part of the music, so any poetic skills I develop will allow me to break down language even further and develop things into music. Working with poems like Emily Dickinson's "The cricket sang," Robert Frost's "Lost in Heaven," and Robin Ekiss's three poems I recently set have allowed me to break down poetry even further into its elements through the necessity of text painting in vocal writing.