Hi Jeff,
   There may be a couple of misunderstandings here, but still the way you've 
framed this summary is lucid and helpful. Sorry if this reply is just notes 
but I hope it helps.

   'Regular' metrics are not a requirement of poetry - that's undeniable. 
(To your example of Whitman could be added the Bible, Smart, and Blake's 
prophetic books and a host of others. Dickinson, however, always 'engages' 
with a metrical arrangement, however she bends it, but that's beside the 
point.) We agree so far?
  Again you're right that Cohen and Dylan and innumerable lesser song 
writers - pop and other - use prosodic elements as well as rhyme and 
refrains (which have been taken into poetry via song). There are a great 
number of common features between song and poem, and quite a few have been 
mentioned in the exchange.
  Here is where the argument becomes more complex, and I'm not sure I can do 
full justice to it because I lack a musical training and some of the basic 
knowledge, so you'll have to tolerate any imprecision and I hope someone 
better equipped can explain my points more clearly.
  I should say that Peter's argument is different from my own. This at least 
is how I understand him (and apologies if I'm wrong). He treats song and 
poem as two aspects of the same impulse, not only historically entwined but 
also inherently joined, and I believe he sees no useful purpose in a 
separation. I'll give three extended quotes, as I think he knows more about 
the technical aspects of song than I do, and his argument may also offer the 
kind of summary that Kent was asking for.

"A song, strictly and traditionally speaking, offer less opportunity for 
shifting the meaning in performance. The words follow a syllabic and 
rhythmic pattern dictated by the music, and each verse has to conform to 
that pattern or it would not fit the music. Extra unstressed syllables etc. 
can be slipped in but that's about all. If  you speak the lyrics of a song 
without the music this difference becomes immediately apparent."

"I'm definitely of the opinion, Tim, that the skill required to write song 
lyrics is basically the same as that which is needed to write poems. This 
doesn't mean that songs can always be judged by the same
standards -- it's a technical skill in handling words and form. Songs can 
certainly be as effective as poems, when sung or not. And possibly  as 
subtle or ambiguous , though some of that might depend on
the performance.  It's unlikely that a "song" as generally understood can 
reach to the  extended seriousness or sublimity that poetry can. The 
sing-song quality of songs,  the closely repeated rhythmic units and rhyme 
tend to make songs small-scale.  Small-scale is fine but not everything."

Finally:
"The point, then, (Tim) about the kind of music is that I don't see how  we 
can deny Jamie's point that the spoken/read poem offers much greater 
opportunities for subtle emphases and re-emphases, delicate sub-textual 
phasing, disturbances such as enjambement etc.  A song setting of the same 
poem cannot possibly retrieve all this, it is too fixed to the temporal 
dictates of the tune."

For the purposes of my argument this last point is significant, but also the 
first. I have to concede (and many counter-examples I've given show) that 
making some impassable division between song and poem is a an artificial and 
doomed project. But these last elements Peter mentions are for me crucial to 
the way we write and read poems, they are so involved in the way we receive 
meaning that, my argument goes, to all intents and purposes it's more useful 
for us to consider them separately. (I'm choosing my words carefully here - 
they are not really separate forms but it's far more sensible, in order to 
appreciate what they do, to consider them as such.) From the start I've said 
that this view is not going to withstand any philosophical scrutiny, but 
that it's still worth considering, otherwise we'll undervalue what makes 
poems poems and probably not be acknowledging what songs can do either.

So a simplified answer to your relevant question is that songs and poems 
both have a prosody (regular or otherwise), but they have (broadly) 
different approaches to it. (Ok no poem is exactly like another and no song 
either, but I hope you can see what I mean.) The argument here needs a great 
deal more detail - which I can supply on the side of poetry but am less 
confident regarding song, and hope that maybe Peter or Michael could explain 
better.

    I know that in your essay you do quote and comment on a Dylan song, but 
I was thinking of quoting another one just to illustrate my view. Have to be 
a later post when I have a bit more time!
Jamie



-----Original Message----- 
From: Jeffrey Side
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 12:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The "problem" of prosody

I’ve been reading the song and poetry discussion here with great interest. 
Many of its themes have engaged me for many years, and so it’s good to see 
such a discussion (perhaps long overdue) appearing here.

From what I’ve been able to glean from it, there seems to be two camps of 
opinion: One camp has Jamie and Peter arguing that song lyrics differ from 
written poetry in that they don’t consist of the various prosodic and metric 
formulations that are classically associated with written poetry. The other 
camp has David and Tim arguing that this might be true but it doesn’t 
“devalue” the emotional and aesthetic appreciation of a song lyric—even when 
separated from the music—because prosody no longer matters in evaluating the 
worth or not of a poetic text. Have I summarised these positions faithfully?

Regarding the Jamie/Peter camp. I agree that written poetry has historically 
(at least up until High Modernism) stressed the importance of prosody and 
metre (though there are some exceptions, such as the poetry of Whitman and 
Dickinson, and possibly others I’m unaware of) but I don’t think that song 
lyrics necessarily can be devoid of these aspects. Song lyrics by Bob Dylan 
and Leonard Cohen do, indeed, have some prosodic elements (I think 
Christopher Ricks has looked at this in the case of Dylan), and they also 
have other poetical elements, such as rhyme, alliteration, allusion, etc. It 
might be true, as far as I can tell, that song lyrics by these writers don’t 
contain any strictly formal poetical metre, but neither does the majority of 
contemporary written poetry that is highly regarded in some quarters. Does 
this, then, suggest that such prosody-lacking written poetry should be 
evaluated as being more similar to song lyrics than to written poetry, if 
the lack of prosody in song lyrics is seen (at least by Jamie and Peter—as I 
understand their position to be) as distinguishing it from written poetry. 
In other words, is written poetry that does not contain any prosodic 
elements or metrics really more like a song lyric than written poetry that 
uses these elements. If so, that would be a very controversial proposition, 
as it would be dismissing nearly all of the poetry written since High 
Modernism—including experimental poetry. Of course, I might have 
misunderstood Jamie's and Peter’s position on this, and so am open to 
correction.

Regarding the David/Tim camp position, I admit, I do have sympathy with it, 
if only because the Jamie/Peter camp position (if I’ve represented it 
faithfully) re-categorises nearly all written poetry that has no prosody, as 
being distinct from written poetry that does have it. This jettisons much of 
what has come to be regarded as poetry.

Again, I admit I might have misunderstood both side’s positions. The 
discussion hasn’t been that easy to make sense of to be truthful.