Tim, once I’d got over my mistaken view that written poetry was automatically superior to song (how I got that view is a mystery: probably it was due to reading some reviews by poetry traditionalists in various little magazines in the 1980s), I could begin see the two arts (written poetry and song) as not needing to be in competition with each other. Of course, there are inevitable similarities between them: the most obvious being that they are both dependent on words (leaving aside visual poetry, which relies less on words for its effectiveness—I’m aware, though, that this point might be contested).

Speaking for myself, I find song more “powerful” than written poetry, as it has the advantages of having melody, singing and musical accompaniment (usually) as factors. These aspects (if of some quality—we can recognise bad melodies, bad singing and bad musical accompaniment), for me at any rate, heighten the emotional significance of the words. Written poetry (mainly that of the last 60 or so years), by and large, seldom does this for me, and largely engages me only intellectually, similar to the way reading philosophy or literary criticism does. This is one of its major disadvantages, despite it having more intellectual/philosophical discursiveness (in some cases) than song has. I accept that this is probably an eccentric view, and is expressed here as purely an opinion.






On Sun, 30 Oct 2016 12:21 Tim Allen wrote:


Yes to everything in your long paragraph Jeff. 

I also need to say that I got the title of the album wrong, it's Good As I Been to You, which along with World Gone Wrong was a brilliant performance of traditional songs with just Dylan on guitar and harmonica. (I hope that by saying brilliant I haven't put the man on the pedestal, Robin, - it's just the way we show our appreciation of something good.) Somebody else might use the word boring or god-awful - so it goes, it's not important.

But going back and explaining why my argument does not rely on the lyric/poem thing is more difficult - I'd have to go back and find the bits and reform them (which I might if I get the time). In a very general way it's my way of explaining why I agree with your sentence below - "I do regard what he does as being “literature, as that term accommodates (or perhaps should) all art forms that operate with words, and songs do."

Thanks to what Peter was saying about what Denise Riley says I am in full agreement about that same distinction between the possibilities of poem and song that you have come around to. The distinction might be endlessly compromised but nevertheless for a certain type of poetry on the page it holds true.

Cheers

Tim