One of my favorite attempts to define poetry is to call it “Words that want to break into song”.

What is it that poetry wants to do by striving to sing? I think it wants to include the pure pleasure of sound and rhythm to words. It wants that like a lover wants their beloved. It’s not a clever plan. Poetry’s desire here is not some technique, some tactic to dress up words in a fancy way. It just wants it.

And what about music? Well, it’s got its drives, its desires too. It wants to find its logic, its pattern. It’s always speaking to time, saying to time that it knows better than time itself how time sounds and moves. Music is always explaining to time what it contains.