Music from Words

Music From Words
Book cover
Author(s)	Marc Jampole
Country	USA
Genre(s)	Poetry
Publisher	Bellday Books, Inc.
Publication date	2007
Media type	Print (Paperback)

Music from Words is the debut poetry book by Marc Jampole, whose poetry has appeared in many literary journals and prose writing in a wide range of newspapers and magazines.

Music from Words was published in 2007 by Bellday Books, Inc.^[1] It is a collection of 35 poems broken into five different sections – Operas and Arias, Love Songs, Abstract Music, Protest Rock and Songs of Self.

Structure

Music from Words has five parts, each of which explores a different kind of musicality in poetry. “Operas and Arias” contains songs sung by one or more characters in each poem. “Love Songs” is self explanatory, while “Abstract Music” uses word equivalents to some of the more abstract, weird and intense music of the 20th Century. “Protest Rock” conveys Marc Jampole’s take on social issues and “Songs of Self,” the final section, are first-person confessions, although the first person is usually not Jampole.

Language

Marc Jampole uses a variety of tactics to achieve the musicality of the poems in Music from Words. Some techniques he uses includes repetition, use of both regular and irregular metrics, internal rhymes and variations on theme, enjambment, assonance, alliteration, alteration of natural stopping points and dissonance. The goal is to have the sound qualities in the poem not only approach the status of music, but also to have the music convey an emotion that underlies the narrative of the poem.

Theme

There are several themes that run through Music from Words:

Several of the poems in “Operas and Arias” and “Songs of Self” focus on characters at a moment of equipoise before or at a point of a major decision or traumatic event.

Several poems throughout the book offer searing techniques of the consumerist suburban lifestyle.

The poems in “Love Songs” tend to present a playful vision of unions between men and women in which sex roles are often reversed and then reversed again.

A theme running through the poems of “Abstract Music” is the relationship between the subjective self and the real world.

Characters

The characters in Marc Jampole’s poems range from a man suffering from advanced Parkinson’s to the classical composer Arnold Schoenberg to John Coltrane on his deathbed. It is very rare for him to write an autobiographical poem.

References

1. ^ Bellday Books