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Hi Ricky, writing yet another post under the ominous heading of ‘a bit much’, and after earlier complaints, makes me feel I ought to head off to the Trappists for a few weeks. But I enjoyed reading this and only wanted to say that perhaps you can simultaneously value the particularities of each art form without denying the complex ways in which they link together. Some artists have a far more highly developed panoramic gift – Joy Harjo for example is a poet, musician and singer. We mentioned Blake earlier as a poet, artist and, possibly, a singer though he could have been as tuneless as Yeats. Lorca was a poet and an accomplished pianist (though I don’t much like his pictures) and composed tunes for Spanish folk songs. Kurt Schwitters is another allrounder. Is that what the word Gesamtkunstwerk refers to? None of what I’ve been saying is meant to deny these links nor an essential fluidity to art work but at the same time I don’t want to pretend that different art forms are interchangeable or indistinguishable. Jamie From: Ricky Ray Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2016 7:23 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: a bit much Thanks, Peter and Jamie, for your latest posts on this; they more competently cover the area attended by some thoughts that were aswirl. And pardon my simple fumbling, I'm mostly working from intuition here. My gut reaction to the "difference" between a song and poem is that there isn't one, in the sense that part of me rejects the reductive notion of a poem being limited to a textual (written/printed) object, often perceived as "dryly intellectual," occupying the persistent annoying unsaleable territory of the bookshop. I'd say a song is always a poem, poetry being an umbrella identity inclusive of song, but a poem isn't always song; from another angle, a song is always music, another umbrella identity, but is poetry always music? I begin to say no to that, then pause. It can be more or less musical, in some cases so unmusical as to seem divorced from music, but assuming a poem is linguistic (an assumption I don't necessarily believe in, and setting purely visual/pictorial poetry aside), don't the rhythms (and other characteristics) inherent in the formation of language confer music on its (art)forms? Especially if we view poetry as an oral/speech-based art? This heads toward Peter's point that "words and music...came together and got separated," or, I might say, inhabited the same act, and may still. I'm reminded of some of Native American poet Joy Harjo's work in which she attempts to invoke this prior/deeper/underlying state in which music/poetry/drama/"religion"/dance were blent and seen as of the same movement. In my own practice, I conduct what I call a living poetry, meaning it's a way of life, it's become so ingrained it can't be turned on or off (well, not without gargantuan effort, and perhaps not even then), it's mixed up with how I conduct my senses and behavior, it has ethical components alongside (and within) the artistic, it covers what for want of a better word I'd call my "spirituality," or to be more precise my sense of and reverence for being, and a small fraction of this manifests as language, spoken, sung, written and otherwise (e.g., poems I've composed internally and never written or spoken). Again, some overlap with Harjo, who says "writing is about a tenth of what poetry is," which I take to mean that the "poem" is an arrangement of feeling and phenomena, only certain parts of which we experience on the linguistic plane, though those entry points can take us into the non-linguistic depths...all of which I say in an attempt to get at this shared/mutual experience that I have no word for, perhaps something like "the creaturely/speciesly/earthly participation in creation." Similarly, on the question of "what literature is," my gut response is "the collective store of lore by which we build our understanding and identity and live our lives," and it includes oral and textual traditions--the inventions of writing and printing being key milestones and branch-points--and it includes story and song, which I'm tempted to say poetry as a shapeshifter straddles both lines of. On the one hand I get the sense we're looking at leaves and saying poem, poem, and calling that flower up there a song, while the whole tree is poetry, but as Jamie suggests, there is a direction of growth or development that we can trace and discuss between leaf and flower (flawed symbols, to be sure). Attempting to inhabit the common, popular mind (whatever that is), it seems to me that much of the difference lies in the framing brought to the work and the medium in which the work is presented--if the composer thinks "textual art" and sees him/herself working within and contributing to that branch, then we get more of it, with it being guided toward a readership and book format; likewise with song, a hearership and audio format. This isn't saying much, I realize, and I'm well aware that my chosen/received form (poetry) is coloring the view, and that were I a musician or poet, a lot of this could be recapitulated in the respective terms of each. I'll end on the note that like in many areas, it seems more and more fragmented and specialized over time, and while this can lead to very poignant and beautiful developments down specific veins, the increasing degradation of cross/wide-appeal and the reinforcement of silos leaves me uneasy over the question of how such directions impact health. In any case, thanks for helping me get this out of my head so I can get back to walking the dog and reading my book! Ricky On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 12:36 PM, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote: At least there's a sliver of agreement! Ok you've agreed with something quite significant even if, for you, the rhythm of poems is a matter of little importance. For the poem that's a matter of crucial importance, it's often the very hinge of a meaning disclosed or missed. Singers are quite happy to stress syllables, say, a monosyllabic preposition, that would make absolutely no sense in speech and would make nonsense of a poem read, and no one listening to the song would mind a bit. Sometimes, as in Dylan, this departure from speech rhythm is a matter of enjoyment - I can't think of an example offhand but I know they exist as I've recalled thinking about it. Here you don't need to repeat your argument about there being bad poems and better song lyrics, no one who wasn't off their trolley would deny that - you'd have to look far and wide for a better poem than Ariel's song in the Tempest "Full fathom five..." (though it's telling that it was written by a poet, whoever we think that poet was). What I'm drawing attention to is not an 'exact' difference or a 'definition' but a direction or a tendency distinguishing the two arts of poems and songwriting. Jamie -----Original Message----- From: David Lace Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2016 4:18 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: a bit much I agree with this, but it still doesn't take us any nearer to what exactly is the difference between a poem and a song lyric (without the musical overlay). -------------------Original Message------------------- Jamie McKendrick wrote: 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.