In Pursuit of Octavio Paz (via Eric Whitacre)

Unanticipated stirrings. Notable absence of antipathy. Immediate awareness of epochal shift. All those greeted me as I sat in the bleachers at Memorial Auditorium during an official visit to the campus of Concordia College in Moorhead sometime in early 1999. 

My inculcated loathing of all things a cappella evaporated swiftly and almost painfully while I listened to Rene Clausen conduct Eric Whitacre's arresting setting of Octavio Paz's poem "Water Night". Before the Choir completed its lush enunciation of the word "night", there was no choice apart from full acknowledgement of my unexpected ardor towards the immersive soundscape. I reluctantly conceded the need to jettison my formerly held views related to the hierarchy of artistic and even existential merit, whereby all instrumental music was somehow intrinsically superior to its vocal counterpart. As I surrendered that sense of rightful indignation, my thoughts panned to C.S. Lewis and his bus: we were two portraits of miserable, disinclined converts. The urge to mourn my emergent status as a newly-minted lover of choral music was strong. Thankfully, the tide of finely-tuned voices rapidly washed away such mental detritus. 

And so it was that my introduction to poetry of Octavio Paz, the music of Eric Whitacre, and the very notion of a pleasurable listening experience derived from choral music occurred simultaneously. 

Upon further investigation, Paz's poetry contains a rich music of its own. Reading his early work, I was struck by the recurrence of certain words and images: woman, water, light, eyes, stone, man, to name a few. Seemingly unseen connections between different poems appeared as I read, and the music of reiterated words combined to form an unorganized sestina-esque quality in my mind. 

I felt compelled to harvest that hidden abundance, taking care not to disturb the foremost fruit too greatly. The form of a cento—a work comprised of quotations from other, pre-existing works (or more specifically in this case, a poem comprised entirely of whole lines of pre-existing poetry)—proved suitable to my task, and what will follow are a few of the pieces hewn from lines of Paz's poems.