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?
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?
Thank you so much for writing something intelligent about Taylor Swift that I have found worth reading. I'm not a Swiftie, but I understand the cultural phenomenon she is, and you've helped me feel like I'm still riding that wave everyone else is surfing. 😅 Also, thank you so much for reminding me to share some of my poetry before the month is over!
This is interesting. I think there is a vague connection between lyrics and poems but the overly organized half of my brain separates the two. My favorite music is instrumental. I've never attempted to write lyrics perhaps because I don't play an instrument. I do spontaneously makeup and sing out silly "songs". I remember the first time I saw Bob Dylan. I thought he was a terrible singer trying to sing a poem!
"If free verse is considered poetry, then why not song lyrics?" is a question close to my heart and one that I wrote about in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak......"I believe that a small number of rock’s back catalogue – very small, maybe 600 out of the 60 million – will indeed endure as great music. Also that, when future generations come to curate the poetic muse of the late 20th century, it is the best song lyrics that will stand the test of time much more than the ‘poetry’ of the era....."
(And the essay also contains YouTube links to many great poetic Rock songs from Rock's 60+-year vast back catalogue.
I haven't seen/heard enough of Taylor Swift's lyrics to decide if she's a poet, except when I was scrolling through Facebook Reels compulsively for a while until I broke the habit, a fan's repeated posts of Taylor Swift lines kept coming up, but I don't remember what the lines said. I give more credibility to Dylan as a poet, since his lines stayed with me for sixty years. From my perspective that a poem has to be enjoyable and memorable. P.S. Thanks for quoting my interview with James Matthew Wilson!
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
Thank you so much for writing something intelligent about Taylor Swift that I have found worth reading. I'm not a Swiftie, but I understand the cultural phenomenon she is, and you've helped me feel like I'm still riding that wave everyone else is surfing. 😅 Also, thank you so much for reminding me to share some of my poetry before the month is over!
This is interesting. I think there is a vague connection between lyrics and poems but the overly organized half of my brain separates the two. My favorite music is instrumental. I've never attempted to write lyrics perhaps because I don't play an instrument. I do spontaneously makeup and sing out silly "songs". I remember the first time I saw Bob Dylan. I thought he was a terrible singer trying to sing a poem!
"If free verse is considered poetry, then why not song lyrics?" is a question close to my heart and one that I wrote about in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak......"I believe that a small number of rock’s back catalogue – very small, maybe 600 out of the 60 million – will indeed endure as great music. Also that, when future generations come to curate the poetic muse of the late 20th century, it is the best song lyrics that will stand the test of time much more than the ‘poetry’ of the era....."
(And the essay also contains YouTube links to many great poetic Rock songs from Rock's 60+-year vast back catalogue.
Both here and here in the phrase "like here and here and" brought me to the same link. Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month
I haven't seen/heard enough of Taylor Swift's lyrics to decide if she's a poet, except when I was scrolling through Facebook Reels compulsively for a while until I broke the habit, a fan's repeated posts of Taylor Swift lines kept coming up, but I don't remember what the lines said. I give more credibility to Dylan as a poet, since his lines stayed with me for sixty years. From my perspective that a poem has to be enjoyable and memorable. P.S. Thanks for quoting my interview with James Matthew Wilson!