Assistant Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: I often imagine the process of writing a poem as being like a counterforce to entropy, gathering toward the poem’s center everything that’s threatening to tip over the edge of my mind, whatever I’m just about to lose or forget. Maybe this is why I listen to music that makes me feel nostalgic while I write—and just one song on repeat over and over. It feels like I’m setting a trap for my own thoughts in order to keep them long enough to language them. Of course, everyone’s nostalgia is a little different—mine varies from Beach House to BTS. So this is probably just a fancy way of saying that I like to be in my feelings.
Poetry and music have a tightly woven history—the lyre and the lyric, the “little song” sonnet, the ballad and the . . . ballad. And there are plenty of essays about music, stories that use lyrics as epigraphs, framing devices. But how does what we’re listening to change what we’re writing? Do writers from different literary genres tend to be drawn toward different music genres? What happens when background music becomes foreground music and takes over the work? Do writers’ musical tastes change when they are generating versus revising?
With these questions on my mind, I do what I always do when I need answers—turned to our Cincinnati Review contributors.
Essayists David Lazar and Brenda Miller tend to stick with instrumental music. Miller says that she wrote a whole piece while listening to Beethoven’s “heartbreaking” violin concerto. Lazar also describes a connection between classical music and motions of thought: “When I’m writing, I only listen to instrumental music, frequently early music, and more than anything else, Bach: the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations, the organ music. Bach’s fugal melodies make me think better, richer thoughts; their mathematical intensity keeps me at my desk and allows me to wander to strange places,” he says.
One emerging consensus is that words get in the way of making words. Poet KB writes that they usually listen to “stuff with little to no words so I don’t have the inclination of singing along . . . jazz or bossa nova.” This is clearly the case, because when KB does listen to lyrics they end up in their poems. But the link between music and writing is clear for KB, who adds, “I see both poems and songs as a room in which you metastasize the shit out of everything in it. Music gets me in a headspace of praise.” I’ll be repeating that quote in my own head for a while.
Playwright Gracie Gardner agrees. She says, “When I’m actually writing things out, I find it hard to listen to words or melody, so I’ll google something like ‘3 Hours of Swamp Sounds’ or ‘4 Hours of Rain and Thunder’ on YouTube.” Editorial Assistant Emily Rose Cole also turns to other kinds of sound when writing: “I deeply envy anyone that can listen to music while they write, but alas, I cannot do it myself! My upbringing as a musician in a family of musicians meant that if there was music on, I was listening to it intently; rarely did it fade into the background for me. . . . My default white noise is the low, pleasant rumble of the fictional space station Deep Space Nine.”
But not everyone stays away from words. Poet Dorothy Chan, for example, listens to Top 40 pop when she writes: “I’m really into getting in my daily adrenaline rush because so much of my writing lies in that rush of the moment. I want to bring immediacy to the table. Right away. And the way I process is by getting into a ‘club-like’ headspace, because my poetry is all about food, sex, pleasure, fantasy—all those good things about life—and putting all of that into one breathless poem.”
It also turns out I’m not the only one into nostalgia feels. I relate to poet Leah Umansky’s relationship between drafting and music; she writes, “I’m a big music fan and concert junkie, but I often am stuck in my mystic loves of the past. Sometimes I have a song on loop on my laptop. I don’t really love silence.” She also points to the body’s involvement in our drafting process: “I listen to my ‘starred’ list on Spotify, which varies from Portishead to Tracy Chapman to Leon Bridges or Ocean Colour Scene. Nearly all the time, though, I end up dancing or bobbing around in my chair as I type.”
Gardner also describes the ways music can function as a portal to a past self or era in a way that is directly useful to the work: “If I’m writing something where I’m pulling from a specific time in my life, I’ll play music I listened to from that time. I was just working on a play that draws from when I was in middle school and I was listening to a lot of Riverdance, The Corrs, Lord of the Rings.” As someone who arrived at poetry by way of the elven ballad, I relate.
Silence also plays its song in some of our writers’ work. “If I’m writing very early in the morning, which I often do on writing retreats when I wake before dawn, I like to keep the silence as long as possible so that I can hear the rhythms of the natural world and of my own mind,” adds Miller.
While I couldn’t arrive at a scientific conclusion, it was clear that music and its variations play an important role in the formation of our creative endeavors. Meanwhile, Miller has an idea for a new blog post that redirects from the ear to stomach: “Next, you should ask what we eat while we’re writing!” So keep your forks tuned…
To listen to some selections from our contributors, check out the Spotify playlist below!
