Music Like Alf: Within Us All?

In class today, my heart shattered upon hearing that Lace could not hear music for the longest time, merely hearing a drone of instruments and lyrics, thus not fully understanding the concept behind poetry as music. This upset me so much because music has been my saving grace. I have been blessed with the gift of music; there isn't a day I don't hum something or pick up my guitar. Everything I hear, taste, see and smell is music. So, when Sexson made the connection between poetry and music, nothing made more sense to me. When I was a girl, I would write poetry and stow it away under my bed in a shoe box, until the rare occasion when I would clean my room and find them, like lost artifacts of an ancient ruin. I would put a tune to my rediscoveries, scratching on sketch book paper my own version of notes on a "scale". I remember the hours I spent contently pouncing on the keyboard in my bedroom until my mom called for dinner. But, hope was replenished, thanks to James, yet again, when he addressed how, despite her inability to hear music, her blogs contained such a beautiful rhythm. And it made me wonder: Music can't just be something one hears; is it within all of us? Is it something certain people are more in tune to than others, but is still a subliminal feature within us all that causes movement, friction, life? What if music was the vibrations not only in all of us, but at the core of the universe? (String theory anyone?). Beethoven didn't seem to need to hear music to feel it, to know it.
Late night tangent.
Anyway, thinking of this whole poetry-music thing, I couldn't help but recall last semester's oral traditions class, and I let my mind wondered to when my mom would sing my brother and I Psalms when we were little. I remember sitting on her gigantic bed as a little girl, next to my brother, who was either half asleep or conguring up some sort of bodily noise in order to gain a giggle. She would sing all sorts of different Pslams, and we would sing along... I had forgotten that memory until a couple of weeks ago, when I was moving out of my old apartment, I noticed the beginning of my mom's favorite Psalm-song, Psalm 51:10, written in pink lipstick on my old roommates bedroom mirror. Instantly, Psalms came spilling out of my mouth in song, like Alf, the sacred river (The other one I remember specifically is Psalm 34:7....and now its stuck in my head...). And that was when I thought about the oral traditions. I'm not exactly sure if Psalms are considered poetry (I guess I would give them credit for their vague passages, and go-to life lessons), but I do know that they were sung back in their day. I am wondering now, though, if they were sung for songs sake, or for the sake of memory? In most Christian denominations, churches will sing from hymnals, where most of their hymns are passages from the Bible, in particular, Psalms.
Maybe I should put a tune to some of Steven's poems...

A Postcard From the Volcano: Backstory

 A Postcard From the Volcano: Backstory

 The wind whispers silent remedies through the night as I recline in my old oak rocker. The years have possessed my youthful color and crept into the crevices of my face. I watch the moon and wait for the hour it claims my withered soul. She's gone now, and this large, once bright mansion, has died along with her. I have kept the house the way she left it, the rusty kettle on the stove, the flowers she picked, flaking and black on the counter top. I subsist without her. I have seen the grass grow and fade, felt the sun burn hotter and move farther away, but the moon never fails to gloat upon me with a gleaming eye. By now, dust and cob webs have organized themselves atop things that used to hold importance to me. When I could still hold her hand, before she took all the color with her, children giggled boisterously as they passed by on their way to school. Now I listen to them whisper tales of the "haunted house with the white shudders", as they cross to the other side of the street. In time, these children will discover their own stories, but never know how similar theirs is to the one hiding within these walls.
 She is but bones now, marked by a thick, earthy stone, reduced to no more than a name, a beginning and an end date; they will never know how we felt in between.

She and I were so lost in love. We raced through life like it we owed it nothing, and took as we pleased; ignorance was our breath and passion was our bread. I didn't own much, because the only thing I needed was her hand in mine, likewise, that was all she needed. I remember vividly, the day she turned 17, the brilliant light that danced on her freckles and bounced off her amber hair, as she cooed her love in my ear. We shared a sleeping bag in the basement of an old run down motel, until her belly grew big. We quickly opened our eyes to new necessities, but never left our passion behind. We moved into a large, bright mansion inherited from my grandfather. We watched our children play in the tree tops, and graduate from school, all the while I held her hand. Her hair became silver, and her fair skin became fragile and spotted, but she was more beautiful than she had ever been to me. When the darkness bloomed below her eyes, and her cough colored her handkerchief foreign shades of red, I knew life was coming to claim what we owed it from so long ago. I held her hand until the hour it turned to ice.
 Decades have passed since our souls have separated, although it wasn't more than a few months after she had gone that I had left my wrinkled worldly body. But, she has departed without me, so I wait her for her to come back, to remember. I wait for her in the mansion where our love blossomed, where I can still feel her. I wait between the walls and in the creeks of the floor boards. I move with the paintings in the kitchen and rock with the shutters late at night. I am in the attic, reclining beneath the moonlight, in my old oak rocker, waiting to hold her hand once more.

Earthly Anectedot....

"Earthly Anectedoct" has thrown me for a loop. The first time I sat down with this poem, I was tempted to throw my "Bible" through the wall, but decided to keep my composure, due to ethics and what is known as common courtesy. So, I ventured, through this poem, red in the face and reluctant. After what felt like hours of attempting to make sense of the poem, I finally left, defeated and jittery from all the coffee, prepared to take another look in the morning with fresh eyes. The next day, I reopened this poem and took a deep breath, only to exhale one big "WTF"... But didn't feel that I was too far in left field, as this is the usual interpretation of most poetry, and especially, Wallace Steven's poetry. It wasn't until class the next day when James the Rat insinuated that Steven's poem was chalked full of metaphors and the like. And then, like a very florescent, and honestly, quite irritating little light of mine had miraculously shone in the metaphorical darkness of my literal mind, (and I was about to let it shine) I discovered that I needed to start reading between and inside the lines; I was about to embark on the path of poetic discovery. The literal was to be left outside of class from now on.

As the frustration lingers on, I have decided not to think too hard, and go with how it feels. My favorite aspect of art is how open it is to interpretation. The artist passes his masterpiece along, allowing the recipient to discover their own story within it; millions of stories can come from one work of art. With that approach, I am going to attack Stevens' poetry.

In this poem, I the most pronounced symbolism I see is the conflict of life and death: the buck contributing as life, and the firecat "bristling" as death. With life's constant aversion to death, death never stops to rest until it has achieved what it came for: "Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes/And slept". And that was my epic mind blowing interpretation of the poem.

I thought I was on the right track and then I read: "Stevens himself wrote, 'There is no symbolism in "'"Earthly Anectedot"'" ". *

*thiqaruni.org/arab/426/(6).doc