Commentary and Acknowledgments

I have written before about my fascination with the relationship between music and poetry [Blackbird v2n2, “Tutelary Instruments”]. Ever since I began writing poems seriously some forty years ago, I have known that there is an intimate but well-nigh inexpressible link between the poems I write and the music I love. A long time ago I told myself: for me, poetry is a translation of music into language; very specifically, that was the guiding principle behind my last book of poems, The Infinity Sessions. All the while, I have been, in one way or another, a working musician. Two years ago my path crossed with my complementary doppleganger or lost conjoined twin Billy Cioffi, who, after a thirty-year stint in the great music mills of Hollywood had decamped to Phoenix and returned to complete a long-deferred university education. Just about the same age as I am, he took the right fork in the road that led to a career in music, all the while keeping one eye on the writer’s life, while I took the left fork toward a career in writing, but always with part of my heart in music. Comparing notes, swapping stories, and playing music together (I have for almost two years been the reed player with Billy’s band The Monte Carlos), we began to develop ideas that each of us were equally passionate about but that a collaboration made practically possible: I began writing lyrics for songs based on—“translated” from—certain poems of mine, for which Billy wrote music (though in fact the delegation of duties is less neat than this, as Billy, who is a deft lyricist, has a firm hand in that part of it, and I contribute here and there to the musical ideas).