Poetry and the Everyday

A very short post. In a recent interview in The Guardian, the songwriter Kirsten Hersch spoke about how her songs came into being. In particular, she talked about how the incidental sounds in her home can pass by completely unnoticed until she is, without conscious effort, ready to hear them and cohere them:

If a whirring fan is in the room, I will continue to hear the whirring fan as I move around, and overlaid with that is the sound of a car driving by that then drives by again and again and again. [… ]If a song is in the air it will grab this vocabulary and eventually become a cohesive song-body.

It sounds a little like the creation of a nest: a mood of heightened receptivity in which suddenly the scattered pieces of the everyday suggest themselves as twigs. It also suggests that domestic life isn't the antithesis of art but its generator.