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What Is It about Singing?

I was standing in a stairwell on campus the other day, whiling away a few minutes before teaching, when from somewhere lower in the building I heard a voice singing that same part of “Can’t Buy Me Love” that the boy washing windows in my poem, “Blue Boy,” sings.

Why does it follow me? The singing got closer, but I never saw who sang it. It seemed like a sign . . . but of what? That’s perhaps a good metaphor for my creative process . . . I hear a song from somewhere else in the building, and I try to track it and give it shape and meaning as the singing grows louder.

Later in the song, Lennon and McCartney wrote, “I may not have a lot to give / But what I’ve got I’ll give to you,” and during my MFA, that’s how it was with me and poetry; when both of these poems were written, time was bound by a horizon line I never approached—there was always more of it.

Now, the direct line to poetry has shifted, as I’m sure it will again; what I have to give is spread across poetry, painting, teaching, coursework, research, work, love, email, and a million other things that still of course contain poetry, and that’s one of the tricks—to know poetry as more than only ‘po-biz.’ And, so far, after every horizon line, there has been another. The muse is only part of it; another part has been learning to wake up before the sun and go to my desk.

Watercolor has lately been a great collaborator, and the creative process most alive to me right now is combining painting and poetry. In Wallace Stevens’s essay, “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” he wrote, “To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.” He was far from the first to sniff out this relation; the Greek poet Simonides is thought to have said, “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” Or sings?