My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
James FentonRead
If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the difference between experiencing a song and a poem, highlighting the sequential nature of music.
James Fenton's quote discusses the unique ways in which songs and poems are experienced by the audience. Unlike poems that allow for nonlinear reading and contemplation, songs are structured to be experienced in a linear fashion, where the listener must engage with the music note by note, lyric by lyric, without the ability to 'skip back.' This sequential listening creates a different emotional engagement and requires a careful unfolding of the song's message.
Themes
MusicPoetryExperienceUnderstandingSequence
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture about songwriting principles, this quote can illustrate the importance of crafting lyrics that unfold in a compelling way.
More from James Fenton
All quotes →The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".
James FentonRead
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
James FentonRead
What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.
James FentonRead
'What is this', and 'How is this done?' are the first two questions to ask of any work of art. The second question immediately illuminates the first, but it often doesn't get asked. Perhaps it sounds too technical. Perhaps it sounds pedestrian.
James FentonRead
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