(Replace the word “music” with the word “poetry” in the quote above, and we’re in business.)

I usually don’t post two videos in one day, but when I was watching one of the Mairéad Byrne videos on YouTube, this self-interview by David Byrne popped up as a related video. At first, I thought it was just because they share the same last name. But then I listened to what David Byrne had to say and saw its applicability to poetry, or at least to certain types of poetry. Take this, for instance: “Um … I try to write about small things: paper, animals, a house. Love is kind of big.”

I also like this statement: “The better the singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying, so I use my faults to an advantage.” I am sure people will balk at this notion as it relates to the poet’s voice, which some believe has to be a magical, mystical, larger-than-life presence. But on a figurative level, there is something to what Byrne is asserting.

Is it the perfectly written poem, the “flawless” poem (and hence the voice of the poet presented “flawlessly”), that allows us to transcend ourselves and relate to someone else or to a different paradigm or to a set of circumstances other than those present in our own lives? Or, conversely, to experience estrangement about our own lives and about existence in general? Or to sense transcendence and estrangement at once?

Or is it the little ways in which the poet’s voice is muddled that allow entry into another’s work and an exit from our own perspectives — those small flaws in voice and content that, despite the striving and the attempt of the poem, sustain in the reader an awareness not only of the brilliance and beauty of language but also its continual and necessary failings, and by extension the continual and necessary failings in the voice of the poet.

My family used to have a mobile home at Lake Texoma, a man-made body of water on the border between Texas and Oklahoma, hence the lake’s name. We stayed in the mobile home during our weekend fishing trips. Because of the home’s remote location, our only phone was a party line. Whenever you called someone, the line would crackle. I loved those crackles because they heightened the energy of every call: It was the flaws in the transmission of information that strengthened the connection by making me feel at once more isolated from and more connected to whomever I was speaking with.

The crackling on the line created a tension and fluidity in terms of my perspective and brought to the forefront the fact that I was talking to someone, that I was attempting to communicate with someone. Without the crackles, the conversation would have been less of an attempt, perhaps something I didn’t even notice at all, the way we mutter to one another in grocery stores and waiting rooms and roller rinks without giving our utterances or the utterances of strangers much thought.

I prefer poems that have some crackle to them because the flaws in the voice remind me that a real person is speaking and that, even if they are getting close, they don’t have “it” all worked out, either — both the “it” that shifts from poem to poem and the big “it” that has us rushing to write and share poems in the first place. I agree with Byrne that one can believe a voice with faults more than one that appears to have none.

Also, in terms of voice, as Andrew Hudgins states in his 1996 essay “An Autobiographer’s Lies,” one thing poets are afraid to do in poems is come across as flawed or bad people. He encountered this problem when writing his autobiographical poetry collection The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood. Hudgins felt he had to overcome the problem or the collection would fail in important ways. This is another level on which the voice enters the poem — in terms of the honesty with which the poet is, or is not, willing to approach the subject matter, whether or not the speaker is self and the subject is autobiographical. Looking bad (or having speakers who look bad) is another way to make a poem crackle.

Sure, you risk turning some readers off who want the sanitized poem or the politically correct poetry experience (or those who want whatever it is a crackly poem isn’t going to give them), but what are we here to do with poems if we aren’t willing to be ourselves in them or explore “the other” in its various forms as authentically and honestly as possible. Poems aren’t beauty pageants, after all. We aren’t handing out prizes to the prettiest ones. OK, sometimes we are. But still.

And having shared the David Byrne interview, I of course also have to share this live version of Talking Heads’ “Girlfriend Is Better” from 1984.

(If you are reading this post through an RSS reader, you might need to click through to the site to see the embedded video.)

I love all their music, but this is my favorite song — my go-to tune when I want to enter into a very specific emotional state. I often write poetry with “Teenager” looping in the background.

Cheesy? Sure. But it still tops my list. You’re going to see a lot of tunes you don’t expect on this list. Or should I say, “hear” instead of “see”?

The recording above is a little cleaner than I’d like. I like to hear the strings breaking at the height of the piece. It reminds me that all of us break every now and again.

Here is another recording, live, not as clean but more passionate, in my opinion. And I do know a little somethin’ somethin’ when it comes to classical music.