Gertrude Stein and I are visiting my parents’ house at the moment, which has, of course, brought me to thoughts of home — especially as I first typed “I’m at home” rather than “I’m visiting my parents’ house.” It often seems strange to me that I do have my own home; perhaps this is because it isn’t so much a home as a temporary dwelling space. Maybe this is why I find myself traveling so often to my parents’ house: because where I live is temporary, and because I want nothing more than permanence, a place that isn’t a temporary dwelling but a home. Take it, Yeats: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.” Slow, indeed, slow.

But home is also the familiar, and being at my parents’ house reminds me of one of the main connections I have to my parents that makes any place I am into home: music. Upstairs, my father has a room he refers to as the “man cave” (which, really, everyone, male or female, should have), and one wall is covered with framed album covers. The framed covers are, of course, the best of the best: Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, All Things Must Pass, Blonde on Blonde, Tapestry, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Songs of Love and Hate … I can talk and talk about being influenced by Dickinson or Whitman or Eliot, but the plain truth is that nothing has influenced me more profoundly than 60’s music. For everything I learned from Whitman, I probably learned as much from Highway 61 Revisited; for every time Dickinson has inspired me, I’ve probably been inspired just as many times by Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. My father filled my life with music from the start, and from that, I came to poetry. And for that, I am incredibly grateful.

Of course, being the child of two parents with strong (though equally awesome) tastes in music — my father’s devotion to the Beatles and Bob Dylan being matched by my mother’s love of Led Zeppelin — has led to some strange twists in my taste. If put on shuffle, my iTunes will move swiftly from Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” to Richard Harris’ “Interim” (I am perhaps more mocked for my love of Richard Harris than anything else. But come on. A whole album of Jim Webb’s love songs to Sally Fields? In her flying nun days? “Her beauty titles ring a little strangely in my ears sometimes in certain rooms?” Yes, please! Absolutely!) to Cat Power’s “No Sense” to Jackie Wilson’s “Lonely Teardrops.” A little unsettling, but so awesome.

And music, like poetry, is wonderful in its possibilities for discovery and rediscovery. Just as I’m always being hit by a line of poetry I’d never noticed before (this time, reading Whitman: “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own / funeral drest in his shroud”), I’m always being smacked between the eyes by a song I never really payed attention to before — something suddenly hits me, something suddenly speaks and illustrates and illuminates my life.

Right now, I’m obsessed with Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York.” “Half of the time we’re gone, but we don’t know where, and we don’t know where.” Exactly.

What are your songs?