sparkle

Julia called me for my birthday today and she was talking about certain trumpet players she liked.  The best ones have what she called a "sparkle" to their playing. I asked her to elaborate and she was able to explain what she meant in some detail, but, really, the word itself was better than any explanation of it. She said it was her own word for it but that any other trumpet player would understand what she meant by it.

She was able to describe the playing of each these players with quite a bit of precision and differentiation.  Each was good in his own way (they were all men) but not very similar to the others in the personality of their playing. All had a voice, a singing quality in their playing, and, of course, the sparkle, but some had darker tones or were more "aggressive."

Then I got to thinking about what it would mean to talk about the musicality of poetry in meaningful, non-trivial way, not just point to those qualities lazily as we often do.  What would it mean if we were to approach poetry in artistic terms, really, not just wave in that general direction. It is hard, because musicians can't always talk about music, or poets about poetry, with any real depth. It just doesn't happen very much. We have a lot of ways of not talking about it: talking about the artist's biography, or listing prizes won.  

Maybe that's what my book will be about. How to talk about poetry, as though it were music, when we don't even yet know how to talk about music itself.