Many of our notions of poetry base themselves within musical or quasi-musical discourses, and for many readers, poetry appears as verbal music. And yet, according to Assistant Professor of English Eric Falci, using the terms of music to talk about poetry, while irresistible, is necessarily off-the-mark. In fact, poetry can accomplish few of the techniques or effects that have defined the development of western music in the past millennia. Professor Falci’s book project, titled “Poetry’s Musics,” has emerged out of a frustration with the ways that literary scholarship has correlated poetry and music and a curiosity about the ways that poets themselves have articulated their own projects in musical terms. Thinking through major twentieth-century examples of poems that attempt to “make” themselves as musical forms, Professor Falci uses the conceptual and material differences between poetry and music—their methods of marking and shaping time, their differing modes of performability, their use of the term form, and their bases in sound—to suggest new ways for thinking about the interactions between the two.