Comment of the Moment: "Marries sound and meaning in a very unique way"

The Neil Young Comment of the Moment is from We Went to a Football Game and a Neil Young Debate Broke Out by Anonymous:

I've made a living as a writer for almost twenty years in a wide variety of genres and have published widely - essays, non-fiction, columns, magazine features, history, poetry, etc. I listen to Neil almost every day. And as a WRITER, a user of words, I have to say that he has been as influential to my career as any other writer.

He listens extraordinarily well, and marries sound and meaning in a very unique way, to the point that he is not always trying to be a dictator of meaning, but lets it go to find meaning itself. In one stays mindful the sound of words can lead the meaning astray from where the writer thinks it is going beforehand - I think Neil is confident and experienced enough that he sometimes allows the sounds of words that power, to determine meaning, and that intended meaning does not always determine the words.

Some of my own most successful work, both in an aesthetic sense and commercially, is when I've been listening closely enough to let go in this way and let the words themselves determine meaning - not me - to discover what I really meant all along. As the poet Jack Spicer once wrote, a poem has 'an infinitely small vocabulary.' There is only one word that can fit at each place, and Neil is sometimes as good as it gets at finding the one word, or rather, allowing the word to find him.

Thanks Anonymous!

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