At the risk of muddying waters kept admirably clear so far by all
concerned and with regard to issues raised most recently by Peter, Mark,
David Br. and Alison, I wonder if Dylan's 1965 statement (Subterranean
Homesick Blues sleeve notes) mightn't have a broader applicability than the
'confessional' aspects of his more obvious poetic 'influences' might
suggest.

_a song is anything that can walk by itself/ I am called a songwriter. a
poem is a naked person...some people say that i am a poet_

A lyric 'focus on interiority' survives the transfer to the objective
involved in 'the very fact of formal writing'?
Several years after the electronic recording 'breakthrough', Pound wrote "In
the case of the madrigal writers the words were not published apart from the
music in their own day, and one supposes that only a long-eared, furry-eared
epoch would have thought of printing them apart from their tunes as has been
done in our time."
    This surely begs the question of how widespread musical literacy, in the
strict sense of the word, had/ has ever been. How does the first-time
experience of a song by a sight reader compare to the aural memory (whether
'public' or 'private' in origin) of an 'illiterate' (like me) rereading the
lyrics? What ideal Poundian music package would have prepared my furry ears
for say Springsteen's rendition of his 'Mary, Queen of Arkansas' ( Asbury
Park) or- to be less bardic- Linda Ronstadt's 'Love has no pride' or, less
commercially, Dick Gaughan's 'Living on your Western Shore', all of which
represent a democratic gain (or not?) in 'community' at the cost of
'variety', or frequency of 'participation'. If karaoke is a far & sad cry
from the golden age of domestic musicmaking (making music with your
domestics) it's the only alternative, currently on offer, to the tokenism of
the fleetingly- extended stadium mike.
    Since I'm clearly having difficulty sustaining this argument (what
argument? I hear you say) thought I'd just throw in : "There are three kinds
of melopoeia, that is, verse made to sing; to chant or intone; and to speak.
The older one gets the more one believes in the first'. (ABC of Reading,
p.61) and related to this 'Or he and I distinguish/ between chanting,/ and
letting the song lie/ in the thing itself.' [_The Twist_ , Maximus I, p82]

Best,
John



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