We are complex and contradictory beings and more often than not it is impossible to figure out why we like this but not that, why we are drawn to one person but not another, or why we love that painting but not this one. I realize that I am not consistent in my likes and dislikes and I mostly couldn’t tell you why. Take meter and rhythm, for example.

I read the poet Louise Glück wrote that poetry is autobiography stripped of context and commentary. That statement made me think about poetry and about writing in general. The thing is, I do like context and commentary.

I have tried my hand at poetry many many times and have come to the conclusion that I am not good at it. I do enjoy a variety of poetry, from Basho to Pablo Naruda and Saul Williams, but there is something about it that alludes me. Perhaps my thinking is too linear for the jumps a good poet must make. I walk and a poet jumps. I steadily cover a distance and they touch the ground here and there like a dancer or like an astronaut in a low gravity environment. My mind does frequently jump the tracks and discover its own tangents, but clearly they are not the kind of tangents a poet arrives at.

Thinking about my music I notice that much of it is linear. The rhythm steadily moves forward, the verses and choruses are generally well defined. There are exceptions, of course. The album One Guitar for example, owing to the fact that much of the music was improvised. It was quite liberating for me not to adhere to a rhythm or to change the rhythm or tempo at will. There was no band I listened to and had to be in rhythm with. On the other hand, when I do play with the band, live and on recordings, my melodies often move against the tempo of the rhythm. I will run the melody ahead of the rhythm, or lag behind it, only to join up a few beats later.

The meter of poetry is its rhythm. I have never been fond of poetry with a very strict rhythm preferring poetry that is free from that. I enjoy reading haiku and marvel at the many different ways each of Basho’s haiku can be translated.

So why do I like rhythm in music and am not fond of meter in poetry? I do not know.

Last night I read Open City by Teju Cole. His protagonist writes that St. Augustine was astonished by St. Ambrose, who had found a way to read without sounding out the words. He continues that we have been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness.

I thought about WHY poems have meter and rhyming. The rhythm and rhyme (those two words are so obviously connected because they both start with “RH” – how many other words start with those two letters??) of poetry was an aid to remembering the text. It was part of an oral tradition. In order to give such poetry a fair chance I shouldn’t read them. I must listen to them. Perhaps I can discover their beauty through that.