This from a professor at UCSC to 'another list' this morning....
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Frank Parker
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The New York Times
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> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/magazine/08LYRICS.html
>
> July 8, 2001
>
>
> IT'S ONLY RHYMING QUATRAINS, BUT I LIKE IT:
> DO SONGS SUCCEED AS POETRY?
>
> By JOHN LELAND
>
>
> In the last days of the Beatles, as things were starting to come apart,
> the band formed a record label called Zapple. The idea -- or lark,
> really -- was to record experimental music and spoken word, starting with
> the poets who had become the band's friends. The orbits of rock and
> poetry were pushing at each other: musicians like Bob Dylan or Joni
> Mitchell were starting to claim the mantle of poets, and the Beats were
> hanging with rock stars, enjoying a small piece of the reflected
> adulation. Why not merge the two in one grand goof? It got off to a
> promising start. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautigan
> and Charles Olson put themselves on tape, and Michael McClure, the West
> Coast poet, volunteered to play his autoharp -- a gift from Bob Dylan --
> behind the verses of a Hell's Angel named Freewheelin' Frank. But Zapple
> folded after just two albums, and within a year, the Beatles disbanded.
>
> Paul McCartney, who had been the push behind Zapple, finally invoked his
> own poetic license earlier this year with the publication of "Blackbird
> Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965-1989." Always considered less writerly
> than John Lennon, McCartney joins a procession of pop stars who have
> loosed their song lyrics on the poetry sections of bookstores in recent
> years. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Patti Smith,
> Suzanne Vega and Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead have all published
> big collections of their song lyrics and other writings. A volume of
> Richard Hell's work is due out in the fall. Henry Rollins, Jewel and
> Tupac Shakur have published volumes of their poetry.
>
> What does it mean for a select group of pop songwriters, in the wane of
> their careers, to be repositioned as poets? Norman Mailer once snorted
> that "if Dylan's a poet, I'm a basketball player." The books are a
> serious publishing endeavor but an odd one, seeking not an audience or
> even a lasting imprint -- the musicians already have that -- but a claim
> to legitimacy. They revive the old question of how rock or rap lyrics,
> removed from the roar and theater of the music, fare as poetry. On the
> cold black and white of the page, do they still sing?
>
> The worst of the fighting has long been settled. Poetry is thriving -- on
> the Internet, in slams and public readings -- but for most of us, song
> lyrics now do the work of modern verse: they organize the truths that
> rattle around in our skulls. As universities trim their studies of
> Coleridge or Eliot, English majors read Dylan or Tupac for credit. The
> lyrics and their supporters have won, if only for outlasting their
> critics. Of course the lyrics are poetry. No populist definition could
> exclude the lyrics of rock songs, any more than it could exclude the
> songs of Sappho or the "hey nonny nonny" nonsense of Shakespeare; any
> high-culture guardians who would exclude rock have lost the authority to
> do so. The books of lyrics are the spoils of victory -- not an aspirant's
> claim but a victory lap.
>
> But the value of this victory is questionable. After living so long under
> these songs' caterwauling sway, I recently spent a month inside the
> ruminative pages of the printed lyrics, without the alimentary boost of
> the music. It is a quiet neighborhood, filled with nice finds: the mature
> lyricism of later Joni Mitchell songs, the economy McCartney hewed to in
> the Beatles. Yet these seem like dry satisfactions. There are some fine
> verses in these books, but the power and poetry forged by McCartney,
> Mitchell and the rest lie in a far more complicated and scurrilous set of
> connections.
>
> On a brilliant afternoon in the spring, Bob Holman, a poet and believer,
> piled the books of lyrics on the desk of his TriBeCa loft. An original
> member of the raucous Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side, he has
> done more than anyone to restore the rattle and dissonance to poetry, the
> sweaty ambition of performance and rant. He wears rectangular tortoise-
> shell glasses and has a shock of hair cresting from the top of his head,
> as if it's pulling him up from above. He jabbed a finger happily at a
> bridge in McCartney's "When I'm 64":
>
>
> You'll be older too,
> And if you say the word -
> I could stay with you.
>
>
> It was a formal element, a haiku -- well, almost -- illustrating what
> Holman thought was wrong with drawing a line between poems and songs,
> isolating poetry from the stream of popular culture. "We make these
> distinctions so we have something to talk about other than the poems
> themselves," he said. He started piling up a second round of poetry
> books -- pamphlets called chapbooks that are sold at slams. "These people
> are writing great rock 'n' roll poetry," he said, spitting the "hair-
> flinging anarchy" of rock 'n' roll. He meant this as a compliment, but it
> was also a recognition of how poetry and pop music have shifted their
> public roles in the last few decades: how poets are now happy to seek
> legitimacy in the vulgar swagger of rockers rather than the other way
> around. The alternative is the quiet cloister of the academy.
>
> Song lyrics have no obligation to work as poetry. Though poetry began in
> song (lyric poems, for example, were set to the lyre), by now, the two
> serve different needs. To oversimplify, poems shape the public
> language -- words, meter, what have you -- to reveal interior truths.
> Songs, by contrast, have to unite audiences in collective truths. Great
> lyrics, even fancy ones, do not necessarily aspire to poetry. For
> example, John Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance" scans neatly:
>
>
> Ev'rybody's talking about
> Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism,
> Ragism, Tagism
> This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m.
> All we are saying is give peace a chance
>
>
> But the song's yearnings and remedies are all exterior, and its
> persuasion lies in melody and timbre; it succeeds as song, not as verse.
> This is not a lesser victory, just a different one. As Yeats wrote, "We
> make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with
> ourselves, poetry."
>
> Yet nothing prevents songs from taking on this other, interior quarrel.
> If poetry is, as Leonard Cohen contends, a verdict and not an intention,
> rock has long extended itself as an opportunity, a soapbox for poets and
> pseuds. Lou Reed studied with Delmore Schwartz.
>
> Cohen and Patti Smith were published poets well before they recorded
> songs. Richard Hell, then Richard Meyers, ran away from home at age 17 to
> come to New York and be a poet -- a romantic journey, tied as much to
> vices as verses. "It's interesting how you put that, 'The romance of
> poetry,' taking for granted that it's about a whole sexy way of life,"
> Hell said in a recent e-mail exchange. As a teenager, he idolized Dylan
> Thomas; he slid from poetry to what became punk rock, gaining and losing
> something along the way. "I thought I'd have fun bringing things I'd
> learned reading and writing poems into music lyrics, but I ended up
> mostly writing just way more spicy versions of the classic lyric styles."
>
> In the quiet of print, rock lyrics are often less than meets the ear.
> Rock has always found meaning in nonsense, whether the exuberant whoop of
> Little Richard's "wop bop a loo bop," or the portentous non sequiturs of
> the alternative band Pavement:
>
>
> Life is a forklift.
> Now my mouth is a forklift,
> This I ask: that you serve as a forklift too.
>
>
> These puzzlements are diffusely utopian: they promise the existence of
> another world in which life can be anything and all confusions melt away.
> Salman Rushdie, in his novel "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," writes of
> this vision: "Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it
> shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world."
>
> The embrace of nonsense and non sequiturs is an inheritance from rural
> folk music and the blues, which use absurdism to face a capriciously hard
> world. Dylan adapted this trope for a rock 'n' roll world grappling with
> Vietnam and the destruction of the civil rights heroes. Applying old
> truths to a fiercely modern form, he conjured anachronistic landscapes of
> hard rain and darkness at the break of noon, biblical justice and
> sorrows. Songs like "Desolation Row" poked at truths using language that
> was rambling, funny and resolutely poetic, whether sung or sprawled
> across the pages of Dylan's "Lyrics, 1962-1985":
>
>
> They're selling postcards of the hanging
> They're painting the passports brown
> The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
> The circus is in town
> Here comes the blind commissioner
> They've got him in a trance
> One hand is tied to the tightrope walker
> The other is in his pants
>
>
> This was a literary play, evoking one vision of desolation to critique or
> exorcise another. You didn't have to follow all his allusions; Dylan's
> power lay in creating mystery, not resolving it. Audiences that once
> screamed through Beatles shows hung rapt on his words. And after Dylan,
> it is fair to say, the deluge.
>
> But the import of rock songs often lies in the gaps between the words,
> inviting the guesswork and reflection and temporary epiphany that are the
> richest part of listening. The real lyrics to "Louie, Louie," for
> example, could never signify like the rumor and innuendo. And unlike the
> words of Cole Porter or Stephen Sondheim or the other pop or cabaret
> writers compiled in the recent book "Reading Lyrics," which deliver the
> same message whether sung or read, the rock songs need the blur of the
> music to fill in the meaning. Even vacant rock songs -- say, "Pretty
> Vacant" by the Sex Pistols -- promise not a vacuity of meaning but a
> surfeit. It has been a tenet of the rock era that those three-minute
> songs, pored over by their adherents, carry deeper truths than the
> institutions around them. This may be a vanity, but it has been a
> powerful one. The words are just the way in. As Pete Townsend of the Who
> once said, discussing MTV, "You can speak a language there where nothing
> you say needs to make sense, but everyone understands you anyway."
>
> The persistence of this shared meaning points to one of the poetic limits
> of song lyrics. They communicate collectively; they preach to the in
> crowd. The words to songs, however idiosyncratic, do not direct us to
> recognize an intelligence independent from and outside our own. Instead,
> they give novel shape to our points of agreement, what Richard Hell
> called "the classic lyric styles." Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," for
> example, about the hopelessly square Mr. Jones, would be lost on its
> central character. Decades later, when Dylan began writing as a
> born-again Christian, hectoring his audience -- which is to say, moving
> away from any points of agreement -- he ceased to communicate as a
> songwriter. Poetry is not obliged to these communal ties.
>
> Rock lyrics are by nature overheated and fragmented; they generate more
> good lines than coherent works. Some of the most compelling believe in
> revelation or transcendence but stop short of trying to show it (this is
> perhaps low art's privilege: to defer to a higher art for the details).
> Lou Reed's "Some Kinda Love," for example, hints at revelation through
> sexual transgression, walking only as far as the edge without looking
> over:
>
>
> Put jelly on your shoulder
> Let's do what you fear most
> That from which you recoil
> But still makes your eyes moist
>
>
> The lyrics, the jelly, get you halfway there. The music -- Reed's flinty
> voice, the erotic curl of the guitar notes -- suggests enough of the
> rest.
>
> Many of these evocative fragments do not seem so pretty on the page. As
> poems, even good song lyrics often feel beholden to easy rhymes or
> predictable formulas. Taken out of context, these songwriting conventions
> often feel exposed and mannered. Music is a soft lyric's best friend, and
> a lot of the verses here can use the companionship. But there are also
> some revelations on the pages. Leonard Cohen, who published his first
> book of poetry a decade before his first album, reads as darkly funny on
> the page, a quiet smolder in a neatly tailored suit. In a typically
> corrosive twist on the cliche of the tormented artist, he writes,
>
>
> I said to Hank Williams, "How lonely does it get?"
> Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
> but I hear him coughing all night long
> a hundred floors above me in the tower of song.
>
>
> The biggest surprises are McCartney's. John Lennon's 1964 book "In His
> Own Write" bills its author as "The Writing Beatle!" "Blackbird Singing"
> is McCartney's revenge. Instead of mooning about poetic stuff like misty
> weather and limpid eyes or reaching for the grand statements favored by
> Lennon, McCartney at his best is all business, compact and plain-spoken.
> His characters have names, like Lovely Rita or Father Mackenzie, and
> perform bold, funny actions: they came in through the bathroom window or,
> like Joan in "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," they got "quizzical, studied
> pataphysical/Science in the home," a reference to the Dadaist playwright
> Alfred Jarry's science of imaginary solutions. His "Eleanor Rigby," which
> I find maudlin as a song, shows its hardness on the page, as flawless a
> poem as rock has produced:
>
>
> Father Mackenzie,
> Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave.
> No one was saved.
>
>
> McCartney's lyrics are taut and polished; it's nice to have the leisure
> to crack them.
>
> Even on the page, the lyrics do not escape the accidents and textures of
> performance. Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate, has long argued for
> the centrality of voice in poetry, whether written or sung. "Poetry, for
> me, is written with the poet's voice and intended for the reader's
> voice," he said. "The point for me is not 'the page.' Rather, the test is
> how beautiful or exciting the language sounds when it is spoken. Great
> poetry sounds great in any interested reader's voice." Fans constantly
> give their voice to the lyrics lodged in their heads; the books of lyrics
> are formal invitations to let loose -- a primal karaoke. Pinsky welcomes
> the books with the competitive warmth of a poet at a slam. "The cheese
> department," he said, "should offer many things between Velveeta and an
> exquisite goat cheese."
>
> So far, publishers seem less eager to enshrine the lyrics of hip-hop,
> which on record often move too quickly to be counted. Except among the
> truly committed, there is not much place in the culture now for all-night
> bullcrit sessions to peel the layers of meaning and nonsense in the
> lyrics of the Notorious B.I.G. or Eminem. Yet the era's most beguiling,
> word-drunk songwriting has come from writers like Tupac Shakur, who was
> killed in 1996. Lauryn Hill, an Ivy Leaguer from New Jersey, laced her
> rap with a running commentary on how to read her:
>
>
> I treat this like my thesis
> Well-written topic
> Broken down into pieces
> I introduce then produce
> Words so profuse
> It's abuse how I juice up this beat
> Like I'm deuce
>
>
> Like the lyricists of the 1960's, hip-hoppers write against a backdrop of
> social crisis, often exaggerating it with mordant humor. In the early
> days of N.W.A., Ice Cube introduced himself,
>
>
> I'm expressing with my full capabilities,
> And now I'm living in correctional facilities
>
>
> This is another wry take on the tortured artist as outlaw, isolated not
> in Leonard Cohen's tower of song but in Los Angeles's county blues.
> Rappers have often defended the excessive violence, sexuality,
> materialism and psychopathology in some lyrics as a kind of journalism,
> unpretty dispatches from the front. But with their vivid sensationalism
> and the creative chaos of their language, they function much better as
> poetry than journalism. The words can be redundant or contradictory -- or
> throwaway, like the formulas Homer used to make his lines scan. The
> Notorious B.I.G. raps,
>
>
> My life is played out like a Jherri Curl,
> I'm ready to die
>
>
> How to reconcile the radically divergent tones of the two lines, the
> dirty-dozens humor of the first, the bleak fatalism of the second? Except
> maybe to recognize both as survival postures and B.I.G. as running
> through the various cultural currents flooding his life. The poetry lies
> in the sum of the two lines, not in their reduction.
>
> If rock or rap lyrics have usurped the role of poetry, it's not very
> likely that many know enough to miss it. A few years ago, an English
> professor named David Pichaske asked several groups of people to identify
> a poem or line from the works of 25 recent Pulitzer Prize-winning poets.
> Then he asked again, using 25 popular songwriters. The results were
> exactly as you would expect. The books of lyrics function as souvenirs of
> this ascendancy.
>
> The collected writings of, say, Patti Smith may not leap off the shelf,
> but they mark out her place in our public and private lives. For fans
> squinting toward middle age with their copies of her album "Horses," the
> existence of such a book can mean that we haven't outgrown her triumphal
> squall, even if we're no longer braving the sodden toilets of CBGB to get
> close to it. If you wanted to put a value on this glow, you might
> consider Jewel's publishing advance for "A Night Without Armor," reported
> to be more than $1 million, compared with the usual $10,000 to $20,000
> for books by name poets. The book's introduction, which cites Jewel's
> influences, misspells Bukowski.
>
> Rock music has long settled into genteel, adult ambitions. But if the
> books of song lyrics are intended to breach the canon, they are too late;
> that battle is over. Writers like Dylan, McCartney, Lennon, Mitchell,
> Tupac and the rest triumphed by embedding their poetic intelligence in
> the rhythm and noise and commerce that make up our modern lives. These
> books distill one part of that intelligence, but they are, as Pete Seeger
> once described the printed lyrics of folk songs, like a photograph of a
> bird in flight. They capture the verbs and nouns, but not the power that
> upended the rules of gravity that existed before.
>
> ----------
> John Leland is a reporter for the Style department of The New York Times.
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/magazine/08LYRICS.html
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> Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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>
> *******
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