I had the great honor and pleasure recently to join Tim Green, editor of Rattle poetry journal, as featured guest poet on his livestream, Rattlecast.

Tim and I had a really fun genre-bending conversation about poetry, music, and how music and my work as a classical musician, broadcaster, and cultural journalist informs my work as a poet – and vice versa. We also talked about how my work with music – and my mysterious poetry guardian angel – helped me become a poet in the first place. And I read from my most recent poetry collection, a silence or two.

Our conversation about words and music took place just before the publication of Rattle #85, which features a Tribute to Musicians, in which my poem “My Daddy Was an Appalachian Folksong” appears.

When I write poetry, I aim to make music with words. I spend a good deal of each day thinking and writing about music and considering how the sounds of words and the shapes of phrases and sentences can add up to vibrant writing that dances on the page and rattles in the mind’s ear.

The rhetoric of the physical body here is not strictly metaphorical. Poetry and music offer us powerfully embodied experiences as they work on and in us. We feel certain ways when we experience poems and music, and those feelings are emotional and physical.

I’ve always been fascinated by the sounds and feel of words, and also by how those sounds and feelings have come to mean what they mean. I was the kid who wondered, Gee, why do we call the sky “sky?” How did those particular letters and those particular sounds come to signify the great big blue expanse overhead? And how did “blue” come to signify the color of sky? Why not call it something else? And why call toes “toes?” Why call buttons “buttons?”

Of course, we can trace etymologies and find at least some of the ancestors of the words we speak and write today. But if I were to be teleported back in time and given the opportunity to meet the first person who ever spoke the proto-word that became “sky” or “toe” or “button,” I would ask him or her, What made you think to call this thing by these sounds?

Deep thanks to Tim Green for giving words space to dance and sing in the pages of Rattle, and for inviting me to share some of my words on Rattlecast.