Here, finally, is the last question (and answer) in the 9 for 9 Poets project:

 

You have just won the Poem to Music Award, and can choose our favorite musical group, composer, band, singer, etc. – dead or alive (our specialists can MAKE IT HAPPEN!)-- to set your winning poem to music!  Who do you choose?  What's the title of the poem/song?  Any particular line(s) from the poem you look forward to hearing sung that you would like to share with us?  You also get to help create the music video for the poem/song.  Give us a synopsis of the video.

 

Oh ambivalence! If there is a form that has always struck me as universally cringe-making, it’s been the setting of poems to music. Steve Reich’s setting for William Carlos Williams’ Desert Music is one of the giant “don’t get it” announcements – that poem completely eludes him. Oh, and I’ve heard the various settings that have been done for poems by, say, Charles Bernstein or Charles Shere’s settings for Carl Rakosi’s work. And these people are friends of mine, Shere as well as Rakosi & Bernstein. But if there is one experience for my poems I do hope to avoid – this one is it.

 

I think my aversion here has to do with the fact that my poems are – always already – musical compositions. So the only thing I could imagine would be something that accentuated that element of it. For example, I have thought of a “reading” of Ketjak in which each sentence is read not only a different person, but also by twice the number of people as the previous sentence. You start with just one voice and end with thousands – it would be almost inaudible by the end, a giant roar (in this regard it might sound a fair amount like a much earlier – and far better – piece by Steve Reich, Come Out, in which he uses the tape loop of a boy describing his beating by the cops during a riot – “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them” – focusing just on those last five words with the different tapes phasing ever so slightly out of sync until it also presents a very powerful aural wave).

 

Now there are, obviously, other ways to do poetry & music – Kenward Elmslie’s musical theater is brilliant comedic work, and the music of Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson & Jim Carroll have always reflected their roots as writers. But song is a different discipline – it’s not like a baseball player moving from second base to shortstop so much as one moving to basketball or golf. Or architecture.