Chimes (Adam Fieled)

The relationship between words and music is something I ponder often, as someone who writes both poems and songs. John Gallaher wrote sometime on his blog that "poetry is as good as music," and of course I agree. Here's the beginning of #26 in Adam Fieled's prose-poem sequence Chimes, capturing beautifully how the words associated with music can provide motivation for hearing words on their own as an art form:

Through music, words emerged in my consciousness as another thing. There were musicians who used words and they showed me. I saw that combinations of words could be molten and that the fires they ignited could be contagious. They could be a door that one could break through into another reality: a place hyper-real, full of things that had the palpable reality of what is called real, but were nonetheless better than real: voices channeled from ether, expounding heroic worlds of oceanic expansive experience.

Songs that did that for me when I was in my early teens: Bob Seger, "Turn the Page" (though I never owned it); Aerosmith, "Dream On"; Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"; Dire Straits, "In the Gallery" (starting to move away from singles here!); Steely Dan, "Home at Last." I'd say it's when I started getting more into the last two that I began to move from pop to poetry.