Leonore Hildebrandt Listens for the Music in Language
For Leonore Hildebrandt, a poem doesn't necessarily begin with an idea. In fact, having too firm an idea may get in the way. Instead, Leonore begins from what she calls a “place of not-knowing.”
“I’m aware that really I know almost nothing when I consider all the space and time out there that make up the world,” she says. “Of course that doesn’t keep me from having opinions, lol. But in my experience as a writer, opinions are deadly to poetry and song writing.”
She free-writes, sometimes for several pages, without stopping to judge whether what appears is boring, silly or even makes sense. Only afterward does she go back and look for what might be waiting there: a phrase, an idea, an emerging rhythm.
Those pieces of language become material to play with. She rearranges them, expands them, trims them, turns them into their opposites and sees what happens.
For a poet whose work moves between the page and performance, that process ultimately becomes one of listening.
Listening for the Music
Leonore describes reading her drafts aloud as her most important tool for revision.
She listens for rhythm, repetition, near-rhyme and the sounds created by vowels and consonants. The goal isn't perfect regularity. Too much can become monotonous. Too little can feel ragged. The music has to belong to the voice and mood of the poem.
It's one reason Leonore doesn't see poetry and music as entirely separate worlds.
“By attaching to a specific voice and turning into sound, songs and poems become alive in the moment,” she says.
Poetry, she points out, comes from an oral tradition. Reading aloud, reciting from memory, singing and performing connect us to an ancient way of sharing stories and creating culture together.
And then Leonore poses a question that sounds very much like a poet who is also a musician:
“We may play the poem, then, too?”
Between Languages and Places
Listening closely to language may come naturally to someone who has spent much of her life moving between languages, landscapes and communities.
Leonore's home since the 1980s has been Downeast Maine. She also maintains deep connections to family and friends from her youth in Hamburg, Germany, and more recently she and her husband have spent winters in Silver City, New Mexico, drawn in part by the small city's artistic community.
She describes herself as having three communities, each influencing the way she sees the world.
German was her first language, but today Leonore writes her poetry and songs almost exclusively in English.
Writing in a second language can create limitations, she says, but it can also create opportunities for discovery. She makes extensive use of dictionaries and a thesaurus and enjoys following words back through their etymology.
“Every ‘mistake’ and every gap of understanding creates its own opportunity,” she says.
Even language itself remains a source of wonder: the enormous variety humans have created, the remarkable way children acquire it and its ability to let us develop and share our thoughts and feelings.
“There is hope in that?” she asks.
When the Book Becomes Part of the Poem
Sometimes Leonore's words don't stop with the page. The physical form holding them becomes part of the story, too.
Her Banned Books project grew from a cartonera bookmaking workshop taught by book artist Linda Anderson at Power and Light Press in Silver City.
Cartonera bookmaking, Leonore explains, is rooted in making literary publishing accessible to people often excluded from the traditional market. The books are handcrafted and decorated, often using recycled cardboard.
As Leonore learned about the form, she began thinking about book banning.
To her, the two ideas moved in opposite directions: one expanding access to literature, the other restricting it.
She researched books that had been frequently banned from U.S. libraries and wrote Banned Books, a spoken-word poem that also considers the censorship of books in Nazi Germany.
For the physical books, Leonore painted broad, colorful stripes across the recycled cardboard, suggesting the spines of books lined up on a shelf.
But she left gaps between them.
“Overall, this poem felt louder than my other work,” she says, “and that seemed to fit.”
Writing About What We Stand to Lose
Leonore is collaborating with Anderson again, this time on a series of small books centered on trees.
The project began simply with a desire to work together.
Leonore had recently written a longer poem about an old solitary pine in the blueberry barrens, a tree that, even in its diminished state, still provides solace. The poem inspired Anderson's artwork and the idea of creating a hand-stitched booklet using handmade paper.
One book became the beginning of three.
The Tree incorporates ideas from contemporary plant biology. Green Woman draws from myths about nature spirits. A third work in progress, A Tree's Journey, takes the form of a fairy tale about a larch in the boreal forest against the backdrop of a changing climate.
The subject is hardly incidental to Leonore.
“Forests are the foundation of life on the planet,” she says. “We depend on them.”
Her concern about environmental loss has been present throughout her writing life, although the way she approaches it has changed.
Looking back at her first collection, The Next Unknown, accepted for publication in 2010, and comparing it with her more recent work, Leonore recognizes the same empathy for the underdog and sensitivity to social and environmental concerns.
But something has shifted.
“There’s less anger, and more attention to small moments of joy,” she says.
Perhaps that helps explain how a conversation about environmental loss can still end with Leonore smiling at her own solution:
“So I hug trees by writing about them?”
Words Meant to Be Heard
On October 9, Leonore will bring those two sides of her creative practice together at the Machias Arts Center for an evening of poetry and original songs.
And if poems and songs become alive when they leave the page, something else happens when an audience gathers to hear them.
“Poetry and music help us feel in a deeper way,” Leonore says. “They may open us to new thoughts.”
For her, live performance isn't simply a writer presenting work to an audience. It's communal.
“When we come together for live performances, collective feelings swirl around in the room,” she says. “It brings us in touch with ourselves and connects us to our community.”
Her hope for October 9 is similarly open-ended.
That the poems and music might stir something in the people gathered there.
That they might help us see ourselves a little differently.
And perhaps help us consider where we may turn next.
Music & Poetry with Leonore Hildebrandt
Friday, October 9 | 5:30–7:00 PM
Machias Arts Center | 277 Main Street, Machias
Free and open to the public
Join Leonore for an evening of published and new poetry, original songs and words meant to be heard.