Listening

Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort says, "I think that poetic craft is a matter of patient listening. I listen until there's no story, no information, only music."  So often when I begin writing, this is what I seek to do: start with language, lean in closer, listen harder, look harder, wait for that music that lives beyond story, beyond information. That music is almost always something truer than the "story" or "information" I am otherwise so anxious to push toward and write down (specifically because it is familiar!). What I want is the new, the unknown, the emerging. The music.

Prompt