Auden Reznor

Two quotes recently slammed together in my brain as I went about my Thursday.

The first is from The Cambridge Campanion to W.H. Auden.  Oddly, enough, it's not a bit of literary criticism from a critic but from Auden himself writing in the introduction to his 1935 anthology The Poet's Tongue, quoted by Stan Smith in the introduction (I tried but didn't really make it too far past the introduction, to be honest):

'Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: "memorable speech."'

This rattled around in my brain and then collided with a quote by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails from an interview regarding the release of their then-new album With Teeth, something that has stayed up there for about four years waiting to be utilized in my blog.  In his characteristically laconic (and arguably adolescent) style, he likens the songs on the album to "twelve good punches in the face."

What is poetry?  Why is it something I like in my limited experience of it?  What is any (literary) art form valued for?  I determined that I like poetry and plays and books because they wrestle the expansiveness of human experience and feeling into the rigors of language. 

The epic nature of human experience cannot be circumscribed neatly within the scope of our language, and yet, against all odds, some people try.  How to describe it?  When our best writers use words (with all their strictures) to engage with amorphous things like life and emotion, the experience of reading is transcendent because the words rise above their ordinary meanings, their base origins, and evoke more than they should.

Words, well written, give us a means to engage with our greatest human questions.

Good writing should have the same impact that a track from With Teeth has.  It should feel like a punch in the face. Was Reznor being poetic when he said that?  According to Auden, yes.  God knows what that meeting of minds would be like.

Music and it's qualities are still a mystery to me, though, and I have no idea why I like one thing over another.  Sometimes I'll love the melody and hate the lyrics, sometimes the opposite, sometimes I will hate a song and it becomes my favorite in time.  I can only think to say that sometimes, when everything is aligned, a good song's effect is magical.  They're musical poetry.