“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” – Walter Pater
“If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in music.” – Gustav Mahler
The editors for Magma 53 are both poets who’ve also been practising musicians: Rob played in an indie pop band for years, while Kona dipped into not one but two Music Degrees (in composition and violin respectively), and continues to write and perform music. How have our varying musical backgrounds affected our writing? What is it that makes us choose to listen to music instead of picking up a poetry book, or vice versa? Questions like these have led us to our Magma 53 theme of Music: The Universal Language.
Does language have its own music? Of course it does; “word-music” is what permits an English speaker to distinguish spoken Chinese from spoken Gaelic without understanding the meaning of either. The poet’s skilful application of word-music is one of the things that distinguishes poetry from workaday prose – and, arguably, makes poetry so much more difficult to translate.
Music may be “the universal language of mankind,” as Longfellow said, but it takes time to learn a complex language; Handel, John Coltrane, The Clash and Steve Reich have something in common, but not all ears will find it easy to detect. Music in poetry comes in equally diverse guises. Compare the full-on effects of As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow strung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
with this deceptively casual diction from Dean Young’s Blue Limbo (from Primitive Mentor, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008):
I couldn’t tell the snowflake that foretells
my death from the other lunkhead flakes
that couldn’t scare a chicken, dandruffy
weak blips in the big what huh…
For Magma 53, we’d like to see poems which are about music or inspired by music. We’d also be glad of poems that deploy word-music with brio, or which aspire in some other way to the condition of music. Can poetry do something that music cannot? If so, show us how!
Rob A. Mackenzie and Kona Macphee, Editors, Magma 53
The deadline is 29 February 2012. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.