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Coco Montoya - It Takes Time

Nevertheless, the two modes of expression retain their own separate identities. The poet’s task when writing about music is to turn the emotion the music inspires in him into words. The imagery and metaphors of the poem should strike the reader as forcefully as the music struck the poet. If this is indeed the case, despite all the above cavils, a poem is to my mind an adequate response to popular music. The argument about the closeness of lyric poetry to music may be turned on its head, in this sense the very similarity of the two modes of expression makes music an attractive subject for poetry. What marks out the best and most distinctive popular music is acuteness of feeling. Now broadly speaking, in a poem about music one can expect to find two things, an evocation of the music itself, and an account of the thoughts, sensations and, above all, feelings aroused in the poet by the music... In addition, this latter fact suggests that a poem about music might be particularly suited to intimate or autobiographical utterance, and indeed this is often the case. Poetry gives pleasure per se. A good poem about music is just that, a good poem. It therefore requires no extraneous knowledge, be it of music or anything else, on the part of the reader. In particular, the proximity of poetry and music means that the poem about music can simply be read as a metatext.

Nevertheless, poetry about popular music may, perhaps, deepen and broaden the reader’s response to the latter more than academic inquiry into popular music can. Conversely, knowledge of the music may deepen the reader’s response to the poem and enable the reader better to understand what the poet was hearing as he listened to the music and what he was aiming to put across in the poem, if not what inspired him to put his feelings about it into words. This in turn may help the reader to discern what is meant by the term voice in relation to poetry, what the nature of the voice(s) of the poem may be, and to what the voice owes its particular tone. At the same time, these considerations beg the question of whether the reader hears in the music what the poet has heard and put down in the poem. Here a gap may arise between the reader’s experience of the poem on the one hand and of the music on the other. This gap is one of the most fruitful and stimulating ways of considering poems about music.
Source: The Poetic Voice And The Voice Of Popular Music In Poems By Philip Larkin, Hugo Williams And Paul Muldoon by Adrian Grafe


Coco Montoya - It Takes Time
  • Released in: January 16 2007
  • Released on: Dirty Deal album 
  • First recording and first release by: Otis Rush August 1958

"Blues guitarist and former member of John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. Montoya's career began in the mid 70's asa drummer for Albert Collins asked him to join his band as drummer."

See previous Song of the Day

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Location: United States

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