The Sacred Juice Of The Jukebox

Sound is a negotiable medium. You can hammer it into words. You can garden it with drums. You can chew it around in your brain and heat it in the furnace of the heart and shoot it out of the mouth in the form of words. Bullets of sound. Patterns of sound. Madrigals and rhubarb. Music is patterned sound. Language is patterned sound. Music doesn’t burden itself with meaning. It can have meaning but the meaning is mercurial and shifts around. Language goes around adorned in meaning but when the lighter-than-air giddiness of music gets into it and shivers the tonsils and smacks the palate with the tongue it gladly takes on the burden of meaning and spreads it out onto the table like big silver coins. That’s what poetry is. It’s language engorged with music. Not necessarily assonance and alliteration and rhyme and meter. Those are jingly & nice but that’s not the essence of music. Simple sentences can have music. Nothing ostentatious. Nothing flashy. The music is in the syntax. The music is in the lightness of the words. Not light in the sense of superficial. Light in the sense of supple. Light like the bones of birds.

You can put words into music and that will make a song be a song. But a song isn’t a poem. A poem goes unadorned into the air. It has a charge. A song derives its power from rhythm and drums and people shouting and howling and murmuring and carrying a melody. A poem paces the room like a prisoner in a jail cell. It’s never happy with the meaning it has it wants the keys to the jail. It wants out. It wants to be music. Poetry always wants to be music because music has the music to be music. Language is pulled down by semantic weight. Politicians use it to trick people. Lawyers use it to confuse people. Poets use it to blow the prison up.

Any discernment of patterns in experience will lead to nudity. Emotions laid bare. Emotions popped out of their containment and squirted into the world like notes from a trumpet. The rodeo on the radio is audible in Idaho. Snorts, stomps, kicks. The bull wants you off his back. The words don’t want your meaning to ride them where you want to go. The words want to go elsewhere. This is what makes discourse happen and conversation and arguments and friendships and unanticipated renaissances that shift everyone’s thinking and upturn the dominant paradigm. Nobody is ever truly in control. Poets make this clear. Poetry is the opposite of control. And this makes it the most dangerous most subversive energy of all time. Life itself is subversive. Even the musicians agree. Poetry lights the walls of hell with the radiance of its actualization.

Language works by fixed association: symbols with a reference ingrained by convention. This is where music comes in. Music - as an audible dynamic pattern free of fixed association - floats, drifts, meanders. Ascends, descends, glides. Its autonomy is exhilarating. Inject this spirit into a body of words and language becomes an enthralling numinous voltage whose definitions are volatilized by the sacred juice of the jukebox. Music gives language an impassioned immediacy, an untethering that expands its power of evocation. But the real magic, the power that drives both music and language, is interrelation. Music is an interrelation of tones and tempos and pitches and keys. Language is an ebullience of syntactical energies bound by semantic intent. Language is always a little envious of music. Its rules and symbols crave the immediacy of music. Not assonance. Not alliteration. That’s just tinsel. What language wants is a ticket on the train. That woman in a dream. That seat by the window. That herd of wild horses spilling over the hill.