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MBM: What do these pieces have in common with the murder ballad tradition?

CHM: They are rather obsessed with death and trauma. That’s certainly part of the tradition. Maybe obsession is too strong. They certainly have a preoccupation with what is violent, and maybe even unseemly.

MBM: But without the aspects of volition or transgression.

CHM: Right. These wrecks are accidents, and they differ from murder ballads, where there’s intentional violence. If we think of a Venn diagram, well, where’s the intersection? Trauma, speculation, storytelling, narrative, narrative arc, and the sense of history re-told, history shared. A sense of the evolution of story. As I’ve said, much in these poems is imagined. Of course, in some cases, the murder ballads we know today are to some extent speculative.

A poet’s job is to acknowledge complexity, to show the mind thinking about something unanswerable, and to enact thought without conclusion. Some of that is part of the murder ballad tradition, too. We think about motives, we try to understand the human psyche in the murder ballad tradition. We try to figure out how somebody could do what they did.

At the heart of those questions is complexity, and I think the poet’s job is to acknowledge it rather than resolve it. I have no poem in this collection about the Edmund Fitzgerald. That’s already covered. It was more interesting, for me, to explore the other wrecks.

MBM: What role did/does music have in your writing of these poems, or in your composition process? Your web site includes playlists for your poems. What was on your playlist for these?

CHM: Philip’s song cycle is the playlist!

The playlist you mention is one I created right after my first chapbook. It was fun to do, but it was all retroactively applied. I looked at the list of poems, and then I had a lot of fun thinking about what I would pair up with each poem. Did I find the connection through mood and tone, or did I find the connection in the lyrics? In many cases the pairing was made because of the tonal quality of the music.

I love thinking about the collection of shipwreck poems musically, because there’s so much water in these. Water is at the heart of every poem. When we think about music, we can think about what swells and subsides, and we can think about tension and release. The vocabulary associated with lakes translates so well to the language we have to talk about music.

Lake Michigan from Sleeping Bear Dunes. Photo by K. Bigger

MBM: Was there musical inspiration for you on the front end?

CHM: If we think about what music and poetry share in common, then I think there are similarities there. For instance, how do you take the mood of a shipwreck and create specificity from mood? So much of what we are working with is mood and tone and fear. How do you make an abstraction real, especially when they’re repetitive abstractions? Storms and danger – they appear over and over again. How do you make the abstract specific in the narrative arc of a poem? How do you make it musically specific? So … how you notate abstraction musically might be something similar to how you render it in words.

A poet and a composer face similar challenges when it comes to articulating emotion and abstraction. We do that in different ways, but we’re both balancing the heart and the brain, we’re both thinking about the expressive purpose of a piece.

Philip Rice, photo by Linnea Jimison

MBM: Philip, tell me how you came to want to set Cindy’s poems to music.

Philip Rice (PR): I found myself laughing hearing about Cindy’s account about wanting to write about shipwrecks, because it was so similar to my experience of growing up in Michigan. When I was six we drove around all around the coast. We saw all the driftwood and heard all the lore.

As an adult, I continue to go to the lake. One of my friends, Richelle, wrote a poem “Ode to Lake Michigan,” which I made into a song cycle. That was a really formative experience for me as an artist, exploring that love of Michigan and the Lakes.

Richelle and I came across a piece of driftwood, and created a driftwood lament. It’s sort of a folk song or a chant. The song is about a shipwreck, and includes the line,  “Tell us of shipwrecked souls who share your watery plight.”

It’s supposed to be funny and hilarious, but it’s also part of my personal lore.

When I met Cindy, I was working in collaboration with the Center for Poetry at Michigan State University. I was interested in developing projects that encouraged composers to interact with writers. I created the first piece of this project with Cindy, which has already premiered. It’s the poem about the Christmas trees.

After that, I demanded Cindy send me all the poems, and I’ve made plans to develop about ten to fourteen of them into musical pieces.

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