The Poetry of Lullabies
I had a wonderful conversation with a fellow poet, Melanie Weldon-Soiset , yesterday. We are both poetry students in the low-residency Spalding University MFA program. She spoke to me about her work and research into lullaby poems, which, as a lover of meter and music, I find fascinating. I've always been drawn to lullabies. There's a brief scene in " Paris, je t'aime " where actor Catalino Sandino Moreno sings the Spanish lullaby "que linda manito" to a baby. When I watched this film in college, I rewound the DVD to listen again and again until it was stuck in my head (I found the audio of that scene here !). Lullabies often have perfect meter and a melodic resolution, and I think a body craves this. Meter and melody make sense to us on a cellular level. So even a Spanish lullaby, which I did not understand when I first heard it, achieved its intended effect on me through those elements alone. Years later, when the first of my close friends had a baby,
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