No need for regrets or apologies, Jamie, regarding the import of international affairs over (or under) poetic issues. We've always benefited from poets' views and their memorable ways of engaging us, as the arts are not flimsy, a tolerated vacuity, but, rather, an innate need. How can we expect full, creative participation in facing and resolving global chaos if we allow ourselves only cramped souls? We poets, after all, are often moving hearts and minds, as I said earlier.
You also address the loss of positive effect, both when poems are sung or when songs are spoken. Of course there'll be losses -- and sometimes gains. Do we suppose that the mating of the two arts should be any less difficult than creating the separate entities of fine poetry and fine music?
I've read only a few interviews with composer-lyricist duos, but from them I get the feeling that there's as much variety in 'initiators' to 'followers' or 'editors' to 'first-drafters' as in marriages. One can only imagine the hurdles that one person alone, a poet-composer, would have to leap over.
