Loud Music

As the title of the poem “Loud Music” indicates, the central image running throughout the poem is volume. The speaker tell us, “You see, I like the music loud” (Line 2)—extremely loud, with “the speakers / throbbing jam-packing the room with sound” (Lines 2-3) and the noise buffeting listeners “like a hand smacking the gut” (Line 5). The speaker’s stepdaughter “disagrees” (Line 6), because she “likes the music decorous, pitched below / her own voice” (Lines 7-8). Their argument isn’t about the effect of the loud music: both agree that the noise is so deafening it prevents speech and thoughts. Instead, they have a different response to this effect: The stepdaughter finds it unpleasant to have something drown her out, while her stepfather relishes this feeling of disappearing.

The theme of music and volume is woven into the poem’s imagery. For example, in Lines 12-13, the speaker compares the stepdaughter to a porpoise using “its sonar” (Line 13) as a form of “self-location” (Line 11). Marine animals use echolocation to see their environment: They emit calls and observe the echoes of those calls bouncing off various objects nearby. The stepdaughter, at age four, wants to locate herself “in all this space” (Line 13)—the world is very big and she doesn’t have a firm sense of her place within it.