Background & Premise

Music is mnemonic.

Words were once mystical and magical because it was by these utterances that we became namers and organizers. Poetic techniques made remembering them easier, and an age of oral transmission brought the security & power of progress from a beginning.

Slowly, lyrics became written down; storing thoughts and emotions outside our bodies was born, and with it came a transcendence of isolation and mortality. Thus began the visual manipulation of words; spell-ing was an act of magic, not mere word construction. Poets, still like the scop and the bard, were mystical intermediaries between the mutable and immutable, but now via their recorded imagery, thoughts and emotions, they split the curtain that separated most of us from the mystical.

Writing was still rare; words were ceremony, and we dressed them up when they went out. They were a reflection of ourselves, and just as parents torment their children lest they be judged by their child’s acts–just as the young man “pimps-out his ride”–our words were formal and ritualized. Prose was for drafting, not public display; poetry and other incantations were still all that was allowed to see the light of day.

The printing press of the reformation cheapened words. More people created more uses for the existing words and created new words as they needed them. It was a vulgar process in which the burden of a few words could be borne by many, but even though words got cheaper, the free exchange of new word combinations, creations and applications made greater wealth.

It didn’t take too long for entrepreneurial souls to investigate how themes could be altered by form, and prose ushered in the short story. Character’s took center stage, plot got more important and the novel niche was exploited.

Now we receive words in bulk. We joke about how many words Eskimos have for snow, knowing we have far more four letter words for a single explicative. And now that the dream of the collective unconsciousness has awoken to realize socially constructed knowledge, words are not plucked by the few, but virtually submitted by the masses. Words are once again stored in the ether. We text and tag ‘em; email, snail mail and voice mail ‘em; chat, rip, rap, slam, Skype and SMS ‘em; bookmark, blog, broadcast, podcast, multicast, IM, mash ‘em up and more.

Words have become like the air we breathe, and in their ubiquity we return to the ancient paradox of how to make ours stand out in our audience’s memory. So this is my premise: that good prose is predicated upon the mastery of poetic techniques; that poetry’s muse is music, and that music might provide a rich resource of concrete, targeted exemplars for some of the most abstract techniques we ask of our students as readers and writers.