Rumpus Book Club goes slightly off topic

SX posed a question: "@everyone I'd like to use the impetus of that Bucky Sinister poem on The Rumpus today and today's fluid, fluent TRBC thread on music from Johnny Mathis through Bob Dylan to Kanye or Arcade Fire to ask a simple question of all of you that I do not know the answer to. This question is nothing but sincere, and pleading, maybe. Why is it so easy, and so fulfilling, to talk about music, inc. the rhymes, lyrics, thoughts, craft, precedents in music, and so daunting to talk about or react to any kind of poetry? That is the question. I would be so grateful for anything large or small any of you are willing to say on this today or at any future date. Thank you in advance. (Please answer . . . ) —sxr

I responded:
@SX I'll counter your question with a sincere question of my own: how are music and poetry so different? Is that a naive question? I'm asking honestly. I have always believed the two were twined together, a twisting banyan tree of our efforts to grasp appearance and reality, opinion and knowledge, illusion and truth - of beauty, love, our deepest passions and yearnings, and the collective struggle of learning to live by learning to die. Maybe the conversations on music represents a modern lightness of being, a new dialogue on poetry.

I don't know what I don't know about music/poetry- I don't uncover them, seek them, excavate them, so much as let them fall on me as rain would. Until recently, music and poetry have been interesting background static, white noise to take up space - squatters in the open gray spaces of my mind. But now that I am going insane, which is its own thing all together, a different kind of chaos, the result of plugging into a connected network without an adequate firewall in place, I find myself crumpled by two words next to each other, gored open by a coda, and poured out by the turn of a phrase, like bathwater over a tiled floor, seeping behind the drywall, flowing down wooden steps. Music and poetry, when they are good are a grand expedition into and transfiguration of our guttural cry. Music and poetry, when they are very good, when at their best, transfigure our guttural cry into a call to care - for causes bigger and grander than our own precious cry.

But a personal response to your question - I do not understand the mechanics of music or of poetry, form and function, I don't have the vocabulary to describe the power of poetry and music to yank me from my anchor. I don't feel qualified to even say, I like - I love - I hate. But poetry and music have the power to unhinge me; perhaps I don't want to talk about such insane things in polite company.
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