In Honor of National Poetry Month, I’m sharing a poem that my friend Al Norton read at OpenStage a few years ago. If you’re a musician, I think you’ll particularly understand the sentiment. It’s a beautiful poem about music and music making.
A LESSON IN MUSIC
by Alastair Reid
Play the tune again: but this time
with more regard for the movement at the source of it
and less attention to time. Time falls
curiously in the course of it.
Play the tune again: not watching
your fingering, but forgetting, letting flow
the sound till it surrounds you. Do not count
or even think. Let go.
Play the tune again: but try to be
nobody, nothing, as though the pace
of the sound were your heart beating, as though
the music were your face.
Play the tune again: It should be easier
to think less every time of the notes, of the measure.
It is all an arrangement of silence. Be silent, and then
play it for your pleasure.
Play the tune again: and this time when it ends,
do not ask me what I think. Feel what is happening
strangely in the room as the sound glooms over
you, me, everything.
Now, play the tune again.
from Weathering by Alastair Reid (Canongate Publishing, 17 Jeffrey Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DR; 1978).