From a Tortured Poet During the Cruelest Month
Happy National Poetry Month! Happy birthday, William Shakespeare! Happy album release, Taylor Swift! And if free verse is considered poetry, then why not song lyrics?
First, happy birthday, William Shakespeare—who was born 460 years ago today!
Some of my friends have been celebrating a little early, like
over at .
However, our house has been observing another event…
You all have probably heard that Taylor Swift’s new album “The Tortured Poets Department” was released this past Friday—right smack in the middle of National Poetry Month. Amanda Petrusich wrote a review in The New Yorker that seems about right:
“The Tortured Poets Department” is preoccupied with writerly accoutrements, but the vibe is ultimately more high-end stationery store than musty rare-books room. Initially, the title seemed as if it might be a smirking reference to Joe Alwyn (he once joked about being part of a WhatsApp group called the Tortured Man Club). But I find that the phrase works well as a summation of Swift’s entire self-conception. She has always made a big deal about her pain being generative. “This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on the page,” she wrote on Instagram. She has talked about this album as if the songs were mere monuments to her suffering: “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.”
The title of this album seems to reflect Swift’s desire to be recognized not just as a successful song lyricist but as a poet—someone who crafts elevated language in the same genre as Keats, Millay, and yes… Shakespeare. Why shouldn’t she? If singer-songwriter Bob Dylan could win the 2016 Nobel Prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"1 then why can’t Swift aspire to similar heights?
There are many artists who have laid simultaneous claim to the titles of songwriter and poet, like Jewel, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen.2 In the song “The Tortured Poets Department” Swift name drops rocker
who successfully maintains a reputation as a poet-writer and singer-songwriter.Perhaps Swift sees herself as a modern day Sappho. In Ancient Greece Sappho was as much of a musical performer of her own verse as she was a poet. In fact, the word lyric comes from the Greek lurikos, from lura ‘lyre’—the instrument that often accompanied her. But who’s to say that the ancient poetess would not have picked up the guitar or tickled the ivories of a piano if those instruments were available to her as they are to our modern, red-lipped rhapsode.
Much ink has been spilled about the death of poetry (like here and here and many other publications), so one must ask why Swift would want to attach her name to a moribund medium? Why isn’t she content to be a wildly popular, beautiful, billionaire performer who writes her own music?
There are many arguments for her to just stay in her lane. Music has always had a greater impact on cultural memory than poetry alone. If you don’t believe me, click on this Note by
and watch a guy get a whole park to sing Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” with him.I’ll do some math for you. “Livin’ on a Prayer” was released in October 1986 making it almost 38 years old. This means it has survived more than a generation,3 and the ability of a work of art to be passed on from generation to the next is one of the characteristics of a culturally relevant piece of art.
Music involves more areas of the brain than language. The brain must synthesize all of the auditory elements of rhythm, pitch, tempo, timbre, etc. together in a few thousandths of a second so that the music is perceived not as individual components but as a whole. When it comes to listening and playing music, many areas of the brain are engaged: the auditory cortex (first stage in the listening process, perception and analysis of tones), the motor cortex (foot tapping, playing an instrument), the prefrontal cortex (the creation of expectations triggered by musical patterns and the violation of patterns/expectations), the sensory cortex (tactile feedback when playing an instrument), the visual cortex (reading music), the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala (emotional reactions), the hippocampus (memory for music), the cerebellum (movement and emotional reactions).4
Music alone, with no lyrics, is organized sound—some of it truly beautiful and capable of moving one to tears. With such high mental engagement, it is no wonder that music can become so entangled with memory in a way that language alone cannot.
Rhythm affects the body in profound ways. So much of memory is first experienced in the muscles. As a dancer, when I hear a song for which I have drilled the choreography—even if years have gone by—my body is often able to perform the movements at the right musical cues. When I recite my favorite poems and prayers I don’t even have to think of the words. They erupt out of me like birdsong.
Songs can lodge into memory like nothing else. Ask anyone who has ever suffered from an ear worm of a melody.5 Words and messages can be attached effectively to a musical melody as mnemonic device, even when the words themselves seem unrelated and meaningless. During the Vietnam war, a sailor by the name of Douglas Hegdahl memorized the names, dates of capture, and other personal information of over 260 prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton—all to the tune of “Old Macdonald Had a Farm”—an act that saved lives by identifying POWs who were being tortured and held captive by the North Vietnamese.
Music employs one of the greatest mnemonic devices known to man—rhythm (or meter)—and it is this characteristic that makes it easy to memorize poetry. Homeric epics were composed in dactylic hexameter. In modern English, the meter that most resembles conversational speech is iambic pentameter, employed most notably by William Shakespeare.
In The Fortunes of Poetry in the Age of Unmaking, the formalist poet James Matthew Wilson6 names three characteristics of poetry:
Memory, meter, and metaphor live together in a kind of circumincession. Meter is already the first instance of memory, fathering and holding parts together as a whole. It is already the first metaphor, signifying what is beyond itself by its numbered nature. And so, memory and metaphor are at once other than meter and continuous with it. Meter may be present at the beginning, but as first and last, it holds all together.7
Poetry is language organized to convey meaning beyond the literal by use of metaphor, structure (i.e. grammatical, lineation, stanzaic, etc.), and musicality (i.e. rhythm, rhyme, repetition, alliteration, euphony). Song writing uses poetic language at the service to the song—good words to a bad tune won’t fly. Due to music’s extraordinary power to engage the brain, the craft of language in songwriting can be much more lax in regards to meter and rhyme. In the case of songwriting, the versification is often compromised by approximate rhyme, weak metaphor or cliché, and loose meter because good music will always have the ability to mask poor writing. Poetry, without the power of music, has to make up the difference by employing greater skill. Poetry, at its best, has the music within its form.
But what are we to make of free verse, which has no form, meter, or rhyme scheme? Why does it qualify as poetry where song lyric, with its clear relationship to rhythm and meter, is not? Free verse reigns supreme in current literary journals. A many of the recent United States Poets Laureate are best known for their free verse, like Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, and Ada Limón.
Of free verse, Wilson writes:
[Free verse] will appear to us as a poem because of its cadences and scenes, its use of tropes, or of moods and modes proper to the conventions of the lyric. We might be tempted, strictly speaking, to say these things are poems only by analogy, but in fact we will all experience them as poems, even if we soon become conscious of something vital missing.8
But what much of free verse and popular songs have in common is metaphor… and feeling. Lots of feeling…
“This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on the page.”
- Taylor Swift on her Instagram feed
In an interview with
Wilson says this about emotion in poetry:For two hundred years people have despaired of civilization, good order, and sound form, and have done so thinking that the authentic or the real could only be found in spontaneous feelings. But feelings ungrounded in reality are cheap, or worse than cheap, they are deadly. It is meanwhile impossible to admire something for being “spontaneous,” as that describes how a thing came about and says nothing about the thing itself.9
This primacy of feeling, while eschewing form, has greatly contributed to the current landscape of modern poetry—the confessional and political over the universal and eternal. And this may have contributed to the demise of poetry as an influential art form—all while song still flourishes.
Oscar Wilde once said that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” However, good songs and good poetry come from genuine feeling as well. It’s just that song and poetry have to be more than just the effluvia of one’s soul composed and distributed for public consumption.
In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan concluded his speech by saying,
Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare's plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, 'Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story'.10 [emphasis mine]
Song lyrics, as poetic as some of it may sound when spoken, cannot exist without the musical performance of the words. Even rap music without melodic accompaniment falls in the category of music due to the exaggerated vocalized meter. In contrast, poetry can exist without being performed for a live audience, but in order to be effective it must have musicality—some type of sonic quality—even if just in the mind’s ear. The best poetry will expertly employ metaphor; it will mean more than its literal meaning, and it will move us to feel something through craft, not through emotional hijacking.
When Taylor Swift does a reading of her lyrics without music or puts all her songs in an actual book then maybe the title of poet will make sense. But let’s face it, on the page it would read as really bad poetry. In the meantime she is—at her best—a songwriter, albeit a tortured one. Why be a bad poet when you could be a great lyricist?
Besides how many billionaire poets do you know?
Thank you so much for reading this longer than usual poet. I have some honest to goodness questions for you, my dear readers…
Do you write songs or poetry or both? What is your experience?
How do you define song?
How do you define poetry?
What do you think of formal poetry vs. free verse?
Is poetry dying while music is thriving?
Also, please be kind. We are all humans.
(Unless you are a bot! Boo!)
"The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016" (PDF). Nobelprize.org. October 13, 2016. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 20, 2017.
I am linking to actual books of poetry for these songwriters.
A generation is about 20-30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
Mannes, Elena. The Power of Music: Pioneering Discoveries in the New Science of Song. Walker & Company, 2011. Pg 33.
Here’s an example of one of my favorite earworms. Consider yourself warned.
Dr. Wilson is my current professor at the University of St. Thomas (Houston) where I am an MFA student. I am really hoping to not misquote him or get something wrong right now!
Wilson, James Matthew. The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. Wiseblood Books, 2022. pg 230
Wilson, James Matthew. The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. Wiseblood Books, 2022. pg 230
Dylan, Bob (June 6, 2017). "Bob Dylan's Nobel Lecture". Swedish Academy.
I don't agree with the bright line distinction between song lyrics and poetry.
In the beginning all poetry was sung. Or at least chanted. It's only after the printing press that you begin to think of poetry as something different, something written not oral. But I don't think song lyrics become something else, it's the written form that changes. Song lyrics are still lyric poetry. Even if we aren't in the habit of printing them in books and reading them quietly to ourselves. Even if we don't divorce them from the music.
I've been pondering this ever since the Nobel Prize was given to Dylan for his lyrics. Yes, he's right that his lyrics are meant to be sung. Just as Shakespeare's plays are meant to be performed. (I once dated a guy, a drama major, who was very vocally against the practice of reading Shakespeare plays in English classes. He thought they should only ever be encountered as performative pieces. We had some spectacular arguments and while I'm unconvinced that English departments should stop teaching Shakespeare, it's also informed my pedagogy and I now prioritize performance over reading in a way I wouldn't have done without his sharpening arguments.)
But I think the Nobel Academy was making a brilliant move by giving the poetry prize to a songwriter. They were making a move to reunite a bifurcated tradition, to remind us of a truth we've forgotten but shouldn't have forgotten. Song lyrics are poems which are meant to be sung. All song lyrics are poems. Some work just as well without the music, some really need the music to work. But they're all poetry. Even the most mediocre ones. I'm not a fan of the rhetorical move of dismissing something as not really poetry when what you really mean is not very good poetry. I think there should be room for something to be real poetry and also not very well crafted.
The origin of the word poem is Greek and it means 'a thing made or created'. Loosely speaking all things which are 'made' are poems. And I've used the word poet or maker in that looser way for a long time. I cling to that understanding and rootedness in the history of language. Paintings are poems made with color. A sculpture is a poem made of stone or wood or metal. A dance is a poem made with movement of a body through space. The poem as an arrangement of words on a page is certainly a distinct art form, but I think divorcing it from the sung lyric obscures more than it clarifies. It's a form of amnesia that causes us to be dismissive of the skill of songwriters and to forget that poetry is accessible always to everyone. And it makes us forget that ballads like Sir Patrick Spens and The Death of Robin Hood were meant to be sun first. They're included in the Norton Anthology of poetry. If they belong there why not Bob Dylan? I've got a lovely anthology of lullabies and poems, All Through the Night, edited by Marie Heaney, Seamus Heaney's wife. It includes traditional songs and new ones, like the lovely Lullaby of London by Pogues lead singer Shane McGowan, a man who never pretended to be anything but a songwriter and yet whose lyrics are eminently readable.
Until earlier this year I was totally dismissive of Taylor Swift, never gave her a serious listen. Probably couldn't name any of her songs other than Shake It Off, which I detest. Then a friend who is a professor of music and a singer and whose taste I greatly respect told me that she'd started listening to Swift seriously. She said she thought Taylor Swift deserved the Nobel Prize more than Bob Dylan. Now I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far. But I started listening to her, especially to Folklore and Evermore and... well, I also am not sure I can completely disagree with my friend's appraisal.
Swift is incredibly prolific. And she's writing a certain kind of pop song, much of it isn't going to be very profound. And yeah I think some of her songs are easily dismissible. But others... there's something there. A craft, a spark, a genius at wordplay and a way of telling a compressed story. I'm still listening and pondering and am not ready to do a close reading of any of her songs. I've just scraped the surface of two albums. And yeah I'm really not a huge fan of a lot of it, especially much of her earlier, bouncier pop stuff. But yeah. I'm willing to call her a poet alongside Dylan and McGowan and really I think all songwriters should be given that credit. Song lyrics aren't different than poetry, they're just one kind of poetry.
“Due to music’s extraordinary power to engage the brain, the craft of language in songwriting can be much more lax in regards to meter and rhyme.”
That’s true, I suppose, but maybe not for the reason you give. Rather, I think it’s because music has additional sonic devices that are simply not available to the page poet.
Meter in poetry, at best, provides rhythm, but only as long as we follow commonly accepted spoken stress patterns and pronunciation. And even those are often missed by readers when they read a poem silently to themselves.
Whereas when sung these patterns and assumptions can be challenged — and the listener will hear that.
For example, in Alanis Morissette’s song “Uninvited” we find these lines: “But you, you're not allowed / You’re uninvited / An unfortunate slight”. Read aloud, the first two lines are roughly iambic. With “unfortunate,” you could fit that into two iambic feet, but since it’s preceded with an article, the last line becomes anapestic.
When we say “unfortunate” aloud, we normally stress the second syllable more than the other three. That means the voice goes up in pitch a bit, maybe a bit louder and longer than the other syllables.
But listen to how the word is sung in this song — against its natural meter, if you will, so that each syllable climbs in pitch. It’s a startling thing to hear and the kind of effect that page poets would kill for. Who cares about the niceties of meter and rhyme when you can create effects like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X_eZGWQnTw