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.
This is a great argument! Thanks for taking the time to write it out. Is it okay if I quote it and address it in a separate post later? I am talking to F’s class today about poetry using a The Proclaimers song and a Robert Burns’s poem to talk to the kids about meter and stress. I think what you wrote dovetails nicely, and I don’t disagree with you. Lyric falls under poetry. It isn’t separate. There is a concern about it means to honor poetry that’s not exceptional, lyric or not, and what that does to the relevance of poetry itself.
Several of those still sound quite interesting to me and I’d love to read them in a Substack context.
For example, “Folk Feminism: From Joan Baez to Taylor Swift” and “Taylor Swift’s Storytelling through Metric Manipulation” are both intriguing titles, whereas something like ““Make the Friendship Bracelets”: Aesthetic Jurisdiction, Parasocial Engagement, and Negative Space Intellectual Property in the Taylor Swift Fandom” is almost impenetrably jargonish (indeed, it sounds like a parody, but who knows maybe that’s the idea).
And irony of ironies, I am going into my 3rd grader’s classroom to do a talk on poetry using music. (The Proclaimers to discuss Robert Burns) Like in 12 minutes!
“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?
Music absolutely has more sonic devices available to it. Where meter in poetry can indicate what words are more meaningful, the rise and fall of music (in tone or volume) will indicate which words bear more meaning. A number of poets I know do not believe in “page” poetry — that poetry must make sense and sound good when spoken aloud. It is largely an auditory medium. And if that’s the case, music has many more variables and tools than poetry. To the ear, music has it all over poetry.
Thank you for the example and for articulating this better than I did.
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!
Well, there is such a thing as lyric poetry. They are connected ... closely so. Much of poetry is successful in the way that it mimics song or how it takes sonic devices to make them enchanting to the ear. And then the sound is further magical by how metaphor is employed, so that music or poetry isn't merely *Entertainment* (meaning that the ends is the feeling you get from it) but it transcends to *Art* where the meaning of the work is what makes more potent and more lasting and becomes what Frost calls "what it would impoverish us to forget".
And I like your last point about the terrible singer trying to sing a poem! Yes, that's what Bob was!
Dylan may not be a technically perfect or gifted singer (some of that’s just acoustics; his voice is quite nasal), but he’s in a group of what I would call _effective_ and _memorable_ singers that includes Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Jimi Hendrix — they’re not mistaken for anyone else, they often featured idiosyncratic phrasing, and they rarely sang a song the same way twice.
Also, Dylan’s singing voice was always, I think, largely a construct, and changed over the years and from album to album. His voice never sounded like it ought to sound given where he’s from. Same with someone like John Fogerty. Listening to him here, it’s hard to imagine the guy who also wrote “Proud Mary” is from the Bay Area:
"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 have three girls who love Swift so I think there are some songs that have really incredible poetic qualities. However, I don't think that any one of her songs on their own stand out as poetry, meaning I don't think you would want to read off the lyrics as they are. In fact, there are a lot of lyrics that she writes that don't make that much sense, but they sound cool and edgy (i.e. sexy babies, a functioning alcoholic ’til nobody noticed my new aesthetic, etc.). Anyway, I think there are a lot of song lyrics that qualify as poetry and can be read without music (some of Dylan falls into this category), but that isn't the majority of songs out there. I think I need to write something about the difference between entertainment vs. art. Entertainment is about the effect, and art is about the meaning. I am glad you liked that I linked to you! I am glad you did the interview.
I'm sure JMWilson has taught you that poetry originally was sung. My reaction to the idea of there being a difference between entertainment and art is that art has to entertain in a certain sense or no one would like it and it would never gain the status of being deathless. I am not amused by much poetry or writing I come across. I am amused and delighted in a deep way by Hopkins but not by many others. Poetry needs musicality and comprehensibility, I think. Maybe we should have an American Poetry Reading weekly TV show featuring poets similar to how American Bandstand featured new artists. And the audience could be asked to rate the poems with questions like, Did you like what it was saying and how it was said? Does it have a good beat? Can you dance to it? . . . :-)
There is a lot of poetry out there, and there are very few new poems that I want to actually commit to memory. That's not to say that I don't think they are thought provoking and I don't enjoy reading them. It is just that I don't feel like I need them in times when my heart is really aching and I need some type of antidote for the world. Two of the most recent poems I've memorized are from AE Stallings and Ada Limon. I've also memorized one of Sally Thomas's shortest poems because it is truly useful when I walk in the woods with my girls. But needing a poem in order to save my life is basically the highest level of art, and that is what I want to achieve and that is also what I want to read of others. Limon was free verse. Stallings and Thomas were form poems. But then again, "You've got to hold on to what you've got/It doesn't make a difference if you make it or not..." It's in my memory... It's livin' on a prayer.
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.
This is a great argument! Thanks for taking the time to write it out. Is it okay if I quote it and address it in a separate post later? I am talking to F’s class today about poetry using a The Proclaimers song and a Robert Burns’s poem to talk to the kids about meter and stress. I think what you wrote dovetails nicely, and I don’t disagree with you. Lyric falls under poetry. It isn’t separate. There is a concern about it means to honor poetry that’s not exceptional, lyric or not, and what that does to the relevance of poetry itself.
Absolutely. I think I'm going to use it as the basis for a blog post. If I get around to polishing it up.
I can't wait to read it. I hope you can write it up. I am drowning in work myself and I have so many unpolished essays in my Drafts.
You’ve both written brilliantly here, tackling things I’ve worried at (and worried about) for a while.
I was intrigued by the titles of several presentations at last fall’s Taylor Swift academic conference:
https://artsandhumanities.indiana.edu/council-programs/ts-conference/index.html
Several of those still sound quite interesting to me and I’d love to read them in a Substack context.
For example, “Folk Feminism: From Joan Baez to Taylor Swift” and “Taylor Swift’s Storytelling through Metric Manipulation” are both intriguing titles, whereas something like ““Make the Friendship Bracelets”: Aesthetic Jurisdiction, Parasocial Engagement, and Negative Space Intellectual Property in the Taylor Swift Fandom” is almost impenetrably jargonish (indeed, it sounds like a parody, but who knows maybe that’s the idea).
One of my friends is teaching a class at BC on Taylor Swift apparently. At first I thought he was just being the quirky person that he is and BC was being very forgiving, but it turns out to be a serious thing. https://www.wgbh.org/music/2023-12-15/why-multiple-boston-universities-now-have-classes-all-about-taylor-swift
I need to rewrite this whole Substack post from another perspective. If only I were not completely swamped at the moment!
Typo: “what it means to honor poetry…”
And irony of ironies, I am going into my 3rd grader’s classroom to do a talk on poetry using music. (The Proclaimers to discuss Robert Burns) Like in 12 minutes!
“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
Music absolutely has more sonic devices available to it. Where meter in poetry can indicate what words are more meaningful, the rise and fall of music (in tone or volume) will indicate which words bear more meaning. A number of poets I know do not believe in “page” poetry — that poetry must make sense and sound good when spoken aloud. It is largely an auditory medium. And if that’s the case, music has many more variables and tools than poetry. To the ear, music has it all over poetry.
Thank you for the example and for articulating this better than I did.
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!
Well, there is such a thing as lyric poetry. They are connected ... closely so. Much of poetry is successful in the way that it mimics song or how it takes sonic devices to make them enchanting to the ear. And then the sound is further magical by how metaphor is employed, so that music or poetry isn't merely *Entertainment* (meaning that the ends is the feeling you get from it) but it transcends to *Art* where the meaning of the work is what makes more potent and more lasting and becomes what Frost calls "what it would impoverish us to forget".
And I like your last point about the terrible singer trying to sing a poem! Yes, that's what Bob was!
Dylan may not be a technically perfect or gifted singer (some of that’s just acoustics; his voice is quite nasal), but he’s in a group of what I would call _effective_ and _memorable_ singers that includes Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Jimi Hendrix — they’re not mistaken for anyone else, they often featured idiosyncratic phrasing, and they rarely sang a song the same way twice.
Also, Dylan’s singing voice was always, I think, largely a construct, and changed over the years and from album to album. His voice never sounded like it ought to sound given where he’s from. Same with someone like John Fogerty. Listening to him here, it’s hard to imagine the guy who also wrote “Proud Mary” is from the Bay Area:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWijx_AgPiA
"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
Thank you for the catch. I have a bunch of links. There are lots of articles. I will fix when I get a chance!
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 have three girls who love Swift so I think there are some songs that have really incredible poetic qualities. However, I don't think that any one of her songs on their own stand out as poetry, meaning I don't think you would want to read off the lyrics as they are. In fact, there are a lot of lyrics that she writes that don't make that much sense, but they sound cool and edgy (i.e. sexy babies, a functioning alcoholic ’til nobody noticed my new aesthetic, etc.). Anyway, I think there are a lot of song lyrics that qualify as poetry and can be read without music (some of Dylan falls into this category), but that isn't the majority of songs out there. I think I need to write something about the difference between entertainment vs. art. Entertainment is about the effect, and art is about the meaning. I am glad you liked that I linked to you! I am glad you did the interview.
I'm sure JMWilson has taught you that poetry originally was sung. My reaction to the idea of there being a difference between entertainment and art is that art has to entertain in a certain sense or no one would like it and it would never gain the status of being deathless. I am not amused by much poetry or writing I come across. I am amused and delighted in a deep way by Hopkins but not by many others. Poetry needs musicality and comprehensibility, I think. Maybe we should have an American Poetry Reading weekly TV show featuring poets similar to how American Bandstand featured new artists. And the audience could be asked to rate the poems with questions like, Did you like what it was saying and how it was said? Does it have a good beat? Can you dance to it? . . . :-)
There is a lot of poetry out there, and there are very few new poems that I want to actually commit to memory. That's not to say that I don't think they are thought provoking and I don't enjoy reading them. It is just that I don't feel like I need them in times when my heart is really aching and I need some type of antidote for the world. Two of the most recent poems I've memorized are from AE Stallings and Ada Limon. I've also memorized one of Sally Thomas's shortest poems because it is truly useful when I walk in the woods with my girls. But needing a poem in order to save my life is basically the highest level of art, and that is what I want to achieve and that is also what I want to read of others. Limon was free verse. Stallings and Thomas were form poems. But then again, "You've got to hold on to what you've got/It doesn't make a difference if you make it or not..." It's in my memory... It's livin' on a prayer.