It’s hard for me to imagine writing without music. I use music to get into, and sometimes to understand, the tone of what I’m working on. It’s both my wall from the rest of the world, as I write, and my companion. Often, when I reread a piece of mine, I’ll hear the music that I wrote it to—a reminder that all writing is, in some way, an act of collaboration: between the writer and the page, the writer and the reader, the writer and every thing and person that hides beneath the words, and, of course, the writer and the other artists who haunt the way the words fell.
When writing my debut full length poetry collection, Your Strange Fortune, I found myself listening to songs that gave me the sense of longing, of desperation, of hopelessness, and sometimes hopefulness. The collection is poems of gentle apocalypses, ways the world might go, but at its heart, what hopefully comes through is the sense that we can do better, if we work on it, if we care to try. Below is a selection of the songs that got me through the writing and revising process on the book.
