Brian Turner

Yeah, because composition, I love to write songs, and creating tonal structures and harmonies and having motifs that repeat but don't dull the ear and creating a musical expectation and then either reinforcing that or subverting it is the same as it is in many ways with the composition of a poem.

So you start off with the throw of the line or the breath, and that initial throw, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you take a breath.

That throw is similar to the initial melody or musical throw in a song.

And then what do you do with that?

What comes next?

And what's the correspondence or the conversation between the musical phrases as each one is unveiled?

And then there's just one part structure of the poem.

It's a fascinating thing to do.

Like when composition, you think of, I sometimes think of like when I was a sophomore in high school and you know, those biology books where you use the human body, right?

And it has this plastic transparency.

You open it and you see like the limbic system or the nervous system or the skeletal structure, but then you put them all together and you have the human body, you know?

And we see the poem once it's done.

Like, I have here both the poem I just read sitting in front of me, but in the composition process, there's going back to, you know, when I was walking across campus and I read Phil Levine's poem, and then the different times I thought about that poem, or rhythmically create, you know, there's all these layers that come just in the musical level of the poem, and then the history that led me to need these words to find the page, you know.

At the time, I remember telling people and thinking to myself initially that maybe, because trying to figure out why was I here and how, you know, I made decisions that put me where I was, but I remember thinking, like, how did the world work out to the point where I'm in this space, Iraq and combat kind of thing.

And I remember thinking that maybe it might, because I wasn't a very good soldier.

I wasn't some like super soldier or something.

I remember thinking maybe I was supposed to be there as like an embedded poet.

At the time, embedded reporters was sort of a, but the Poetry of Witnesses is something I'd studied before.

But then to find myself somewhat in that sort of vein was intriguing to me.

Nobody was really reading the poems I wrote before, so who was going to read these?