What I began doing (and didn't complete) in the introduction to the Denise Riley review was to deproblematise lyric and simplify its understanding, to the point where the skills of writing poems and those of writing "lyrics" are recognised as the same skills - that is, skills in handling form and in constructing linguistic patterning while locating sense / truth of that kind. (lyric).

Historically I think I'm right to say that words and music did not get joined togther: they came together and got separated, perhaps notably by things like the Lucy poems, where the intensity and ecstasis of the high song was maintained by the words alone. And a simplicity of phrase hardly possibly in the 18th Century culture-song tradition (nymphs and shepherds)

And having let slip the term "high song" I have probably put my finger on the feelings which lie behind resentment at a "low" songster receiving (or refusing) the Nobel. High song = Dowland, Schubert, church chant, epic, elegy, lament, and all that. "Low" song = pop, knees-up, propaganda, etc. The distinction is really tendentious -- it can be proven only by selected references and any serious attention to folk music destroys it. But it holds good in the specific context of a sophisticated but divided culture.

The "trouble" with song, as Denise Riley painstakingly explained, is that the words-music combo can act as a kind of lure which is capable of persuading you by that combined force to agree to any kind of falsity, political, personal, philosophical or other. Song issues forth into the world seeking adherents. And by the identity I proposed above poetry also, having appropriated the lyric devices, can very powerfully draw you into all sorts of acquiescence or thoughtlessness determination. There are answers to this.

One is time itself. The "memorability" of song-poetry high or low is subject in time to fragmentation, though the music resists this. We are left with bits and pieces of the lyrics which become part of our own vocabularies and their force, their beauty, enters our own song-poetry-writing, shifting them into a different agenda.

As for Dylan. The trouble with opening a nomination of the highest eminence to a "low" songster is not a class or elitism affair, it is that once those gates are open there are at once many hundreds of lyricists in the same kind of business who are obviously just as eligible, as against the heroics which seem to be endemic to our inherited (sovereign) culture, the glorification of the supremo, THE ONE. The trouble is not who gets the Nobel or what for, the trouble is the existence of the Nobel.

On 23 Oct 2016, at 14:25, Jamie McKendrick wrote:

I'm still a bit surprised that a topic that has taken in Dylan's songs, the ancient Greeks and Romans, Blake, Yeats, the Scottish ballads, Burns, Van Morrison, Patrick Kavanagh,Tagore, Amit Chaudhuri, the Blues, and latterly Denise Riley, however superficially or glancingly, should be the cause of more (mock serious?) annoyance on a poetry list than a discussion of US foreign policy, although I can see beside that it's relatively unimportant.
And now a Peter Sirr poem I'd better look up. While I'm interested in what happens when poems are set to music and sung, I often feel that it's not an addition but a dilution. Which goes back to my earlier point that the meter that plays off speech in poems is often lost when it turns into song. And vice versa, again to do with stress and rhythm, when a song is spoken there's a loss which not only the loss of musical accompaniment.
Jamie

Judy Prince wrote:

BTW, poetry/music short-shot merges would qualify as mind-and-heart-benders for me, as well. I'd love, for example, to hear a sung and/or instrument-accompanied piece of these two lines from poet Peter Sirr ("Desire"): "On an endless, meandering train,/ the soul puts down its books, fluent again."

Judy warmed up with new respect for poets and songwriter/"musicianers" (as bluesman Cadillac Baby, from Chicago, used to call them)