British poet Rowan Evans invites us to hear the music in poetry
British poet Rowan Evans is a musician. And a poet. And a musician-poet. And likely a poet-musician. He has composed music for guitar, keyboard, cello, strings, synthesizer, and electronics. His music has been used in theater, art installations, short films, animation, and performances. He’s a sound designer, so it’s no surprise that his music sounds designed for poetry and his poems for music.
Rowan Evans
Listen to his website’s playlist; choose any of the eight selections listed. I was particularly taken with “Dunes” and “Ocean.” Poems began to play through my mind as I listened. I’m not sure how Evans does it, but it’s a marvel.
A Method, A Path is his first full collection; he previously published a chapbook. You know from the first word of the first poem, “On Eglond,” that this poetry book will be about both poetry and sound. That first word is “Listen.”
As you read on, you will find songs, mixtapes, performances, and poems that you can hear while you read. This carries through to the last poem, “Tide Ritual,” which powerfully uses words that communicate sound.
The poems vary widely in structure and length. A few are prose poems; some involve illustrations; others are grouped in series of related poems. Evans draws from British history, Old English words and concepts (“Eglond,” noted above, means “island”), and a highly developed awareness of the musicality of simple words and their sounds.
Plainsong
Before: ‘fretted with veins of ivy,’ now
‘fronting the weight of it,’ red footprints in
black mud. Looking for a key in the hall.
Children stand between neon candles
of dogwood, guarding some narrative.
And every one that moves. Strips of hill
and cloud become a sheaf, where usually
I describe the machine of language. No,
this time syntax doesn’t whirr.
Evans is a poet, a composer, and a sound artist. A Method, A Path is his debut poetry collection; it was shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2023 for the best first collection. His chapbook The Last Verses of Beccán (2019) won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry. He received the Eric Gregory Award for Young Poets in 2015, and several of his poems were published in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard and Shining Things (2018). Evans completed his Ph.D. research, Ancient Tongues: Radical Encounters with the Early Medieval in Late Modernist and Experimental Poetry, at Royal Holloway University in London.
You can say that every poetry collection is unique, but A Method, A Path is striking in its originality. Poets have often heard the music in words and incorporated it into their poems. Rowan Evans clearly hears that as well, and he also hears the poetry inherent in music.
Related:
Video trailer for A Method, A Path – Bloomsbury Poetry
Rowan Evans reads “Cyborg Song About Fighting the Undead in a Shopping Mall”
Photo by dailyinvention, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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