I don't disagree with this at all, Jeff. But by 'cultural relevance' I think you're talking about both distribution and appreciation.
Distribution is involved with a whole industry of promotion and image and sales. (I'm saying what you'll already know.)
Appreciation includes a vast swathe of responses from adoration to critical commentary. (I'm not making any evaluation here - though I'm more interested in the latter.)
But also something more elusive which we could call 'influence' - something that gets into our heads and hearts, colours our perceptions and shapes our way of perceiving the world.
Over here the only poets in the last fifty years who have reached that level of fame that Ginsberg had (has?) are the Liverpool poets. And, interestingly, especially in the case of Roger McGough, being in The Scaffold, the tie-in with popular music was very marked. (Some quite good songs as well.)
Since then you could include Hughes's Birthday Letters as a best seller but whatever its merits I think the breadth of its appeal has had more to do with biographical interest.
What I've called 'influence' as a sort of shorthand is in many cases ephemeral as well as elusive. So figures like Dylan, Cohen and Mitchell, to cite a few names that have been mentioned already, have kept influencing their listeners for several generations which makes them especially interesting to look at.
(This is kind of saying that, although I'm at odds with your essay on Dylan and poetry, I'm very much in favour of your engagement with the whole phenomenon of song-writing in relation to poetry.)
Jamie
> On 29 Oct 2016, at 13:11, Jeffrey Side <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> Jaime, I think we are in agreement on this. My love of song has never been predicated, anyway, on whether it is poetry or not. I think that whatever it is, it has, perhaps, had more relevance culturally since the 1960s than most poetry has had in this period (maybe Ginsberg’s poetry was an exception) but that’s another matter. I sense you will disagree with that, and that’s ok. It’s just how I see it.
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> On 28 Oct 2016, at 19:04, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
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> Hi Jeff, I'm much relieved that up to this point you follow my argument. Both points you've understood are very decidedly my view. A minor adjustment to the first, however, would be that all poetry (and probably all song) is susceptible of metrical analysis - including Whitman. (Let's assume for simplicity's sake we're talking about English because French might provide another set of problems.) As is prose - susceptible - for that matter, and one or two critics have made the arduous attempt. As is speech if transcribed. But it's easier to scan poems and songs because they are or can be arranged in lines. So yes, this not a peculiarity of poetry, and I certainly don't assume poetry needs to have any regularity in its metrics. The last person who believed this probably died six and a half years ago.
> On the second point, again you're absolutely right - I've had a lot of trouble dispelling this assumption which has repeatedly been made about my argument. If I have to say again how much I love Dylan, I'll start hating him! Obviously we can all argue for an aesthetic preference, for Milton over Dylan, for Joni Mitchell over the last two laureates, but none of that follows from my argument.
> I still feel I'm missing an essential part of what I've been trying to articulate, which is probably why I'm doggedly pursuing it.
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> I'm hoping with the Dylan song I mean to post that some of these obscurer elements will become clear. I don't think you'll be in agreement, but that's fine. At this stage, I'd happily just settle for not being misunderstood.
> Jamie
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> On 28 Oct 2016, at 15:06, Jeffrey Side wrote:
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> Jamie, thanks for your explanation. It has cleared up a few things for me. I just wanted to be certain that you were not saying that all poetry that lacked prosody or metre was not poetry, and that song was of lesser artistic or aesthetic value because prosody and metre usually don’t figure prominently in most instances of it.
