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.
