In her comment on yesterday's post, Carlene said, "I think I want to ponder what it means to have a keynote in writing. It may well be the one thing that focuses a piece and helps it transcend ordinariness."

Carlene is a teacher, and I suspect that she is thinking of keynote as a way to extend a discussion of setting. I agree: By asking readers to ponder the keynote of Dickens's Little Dorrit or Proust's Swann's Way or Joyce's Ulyssses or Virgil's Aeneid or Eliot's Middlemarch or Morrison's Beloved, a teacher will push them far beyond a simple "where does this novel take place?" understanding of setting. Not only does the idea of keynote press them to consider the persistent underlying sound of place but it allows them to absorb the idea of fluidity in that place--the movement, human or otherwise--visually, sonically, spiritually--that is the canvas of setting in a work of art.

But keynote also seems to me to be a very useful consideration in the creation of work. Setting is, after all, both a unity and a fluctuation. It is also immensely physical. As John Luther Adams writes in Winter Music, "The earth speaks to us--the names we give to places, plants and animals, to the weather, the seasons, the directions, and the elements." For a poet, such translation, such attention, requires us to choose these names--these nouns--both prudently and wildly . . . and I don't think of prudently and wildly as opposites but as another aspect of both/and. Accuracy can be wild risk. Of course it can.