Yoni Wolf Listens to Poetry

It’s probably safe to say that you’re the only songwriter I’ve ever come across who’s thrown in a quote from Marilyn Hacker. I’m curious what your relationship is to contemporary poetry or writing in general.

Well, I listen to poetry when I can. I don’t really read it, because I don’t really believe in it as a written thing, to be honest; at least for myself. I don’t know how to read it. I prefer to think of poetry as an oral thing.

How do you listen to it? Do you find stuff on the Internet? Or you go hear people read?

When I first started listening to it, I worked in a library at the University of Cincinnati. This particular library was an audiovisual library, geared toward educators. I would just go through the stacks and there was a record collection, and I had started to make beats and stuff, so I’d look through records. I was just interested in music and records in general. I found these poetry records and I thought, Well, maybe I could get a cool vocal sample, you know? Then I started actually just listening to them and was kind of blown away.

Marilyn Hacker was one of those records. I had never heard of any of these poets, except for maybe Dylan Thomas, kind of. There was a record of his. But I just started listening to them, and kind of fell in love with that. And then when I went through all of those records (and many of them were pretty good), I started going to the public library in downtown Cincinnati, which had a really great A/V collection. I started pulling out tapes of poets reading their own work, sort of at random or based on the titles of the poems or something that seemed interesting. I found a lot of great stuff that way.

Just recently, over the past couple of months, I’ve discovered this website that is just wonderful for me to listen to. I really enjoy it. I don’t know if it was set up as a podcast or if it was a radio thing but it’s a show put out by the Library of Congress called “The Poet and the Poem." Have you heard of it, with Grace Cavalieri as the host? She has a different poet on every show for an hour. They read their poems and they talk about the poems, and they talk about their lives and their process. She’s an interesting host. She almost reminds me of an intellectual Jerry Blank from Strangers with Candy. [laughs] Just the way she talks. She’s kind of halfway inappropriate but in a very intellectual way. I love her. So I discovered that and that’s been a new well, really. In just the last month or two I’ve been getting deep into it.

Did you used to write poetry, or do you still?

I don’t know what the difference is really, between poetry and song, except that I’m starting to figure it out. Some poems are easier than others to turn into songs in a way, based upon the rhythm and the text or whatever. But I think of it as being the same occupation really; I just think that a lot of songwriters get away with a lot of bullshit. So do poets.

I think of it more in the olden sense of you’re just someone who’s putting words together in a way that is meaningful and superdistilled. I think they shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as a different occupations. They are more or less the same thing.

Would you consider yourself a lyric-based songwriter?

Yes.

And then why? What’s the power in that?

I was just thinking about that the other day. I could talk about the world at large and what poetry is or whatever, but I can’t really be accurate like that. But for me personally I think there’s a large part of who I am that I have no other way to communicate except through this quiet, sort of meditative activity. Just thinking and boiling things down, really distilling the world into a few words that I believe to be true. It’s just a different form of communication. There’s that large part of myself that I can’t communicate or express to others without that thing, without writing. So it’s an important thing for me to do. That’s just how I’m wired.

There are others like me—I know that because I listen to them—and I’m touched when someone has come to some realization, or come to a realization that they’ve had no realization, and says something in a certain way that just hits the spot. It touches me. I think it’s an important thing for humans. All the arts are, and they have their own subtleties and intricacies and ways that they communicate; whether it be through the body or the mind or language, or just strictly sound for other types of music.

It’s an important thing and it’s one of the main differences between us and other species.

Yeah. What is it? It’s an important thing how?

It’s our attempt to try to express what it is to exist here, and sort through things in a way that is meaningful to us without necessarily being an intellectual pursuit; without trying to figure things out scientifically. I guess science is another way to do that through rationale, but to me, the arts are the flip side of that coin in a way. [They express those thoughts] through a different, less regimented or classifiable sense.

That’s why I like writing. It’s this gut form of communication. It’s really about those few true words that you feel express what it is for you as a person, as a creature, as a collection of molecules, to be here at this time.