Okay, I don’t think it will be. I don’t think many of us are trying to make it one and I don’t think we could succeed if we tried.
I would point out a couple of other poets who similarly studied formal verse and went on to create verse that other people felt they could imitate without paying their dues:
Ginsberg - Anybody who reads Howl can talk like that for the next half hour. But Ginsberg started out working with traditional verse forms and applied those insights when he broke away from it.
E. E. Cummings - (I am told he didn’t like how his name became all lower-case himself) before the supposedly no-rules-apply work he is now famous for, Cummings published a book called Tulips and Chimneys in which he clearly did a lot of work experimenting with the sonnet.
Oh, Steve Allen, where are you when we need you?
Yeah, the problem with treating song lyrics as poetry is that they are almost always written to take advantage of music’s ability to prop them up. So, saying that people song lyrics are popular is importantly different from saying that people still enjoy poetry.
But, because they are set to music, at least song lyrics are forced to recon with musicality, which gives them a better claim to really being poetry than a lot of free verse.
I don’t spend a lot of time listening to it, but I generally find that ‘slam’ poetry works best when it pulls from the poetic tradition that rap itself comes from - the African-American balladry tradition, which is largely Skeltonic or tumbling verse. Having a driving beat in your head I don’t think damages the work, though it does make it more dependent on performance. It’s actually unfortunate that performance is a neglected part of the study of verse. Yet, I do dismiss attempts at poetry that depend on what I call the ‘free verse voice’ – a lofty, lilting cadence that can make nearly everything sound like poetry.
Performance is really a whole other subject itself, but let’s just say that the written form can only barely transcribe what the poet heard in the head. The poet had a performance in mind, but couldn’t write it down. We’ll never get it back, and in the case of someone like Robert Frost, who recited like he was doing a Senor Cardgage impersonation, even a recording doesn’t necessarily tell you what the artist heard in his head. Poetry is always written with a performance in mind, and we but blindly recreate the sound of the verse in the poet’s own mind.
In fact, I think part of the problem comes from generations of teachers trying to convince students to care about poetry by pushing a facile notion of what it is. The first generation that told students not to worry about the technicalities but just to express themselves was hoping to lead them down a garden path to the real stuff. Successive generations understood less and less that the garden path wasn’t the destination itself.
Fair enough!
And it’s no patch on poets like you (and me, for that matter). The long tail began to reign in the late 20th century, and reign it shall forever more, I think. People will be enjoying knitting and crocheting 100 years from now, and it will not have a big cultural impact but that doesn’t matter so much. But it is a big cultural shift to recognize that poetry has entered subculture status and will never leave it again.
Yes, I read one of his rhyme-n-meter works once. Oh my! But at that time, he could get that stuff published (supply, demand, etc.).
Haha, yes, this video definitively shows that at least some song lyrics are not going to work as poetry.
Good point!
Oh fuck yes hate hate HATE! Preferably read by a hippieistic poet with everything sounding so meaningful. BTW, I have invented a word to describe the vast majority of post-War free verse poetry: meaning-y.
OMG! Inspired by what you wrote, I just listened to Frost read for the first time:
This is a travesty! Is he trying to be fucking *Scottish?!*I don’t think this holds in the case of rhymed iambic pentameter. It supplies its own performance cues. Now, as to free verse, you have a strong point, though I think that very well-written verse would supply at least some guidance via its inherent rhythms.
Right, again a hippie-rific 1960s, 1970s kind of, “Just let it all hang out!” I’m a beatnik myself, but art is hard work, or at least should be. Not every unique snowflake is a great artist.
I just don’t see it as a big cultural shift. I see it as a very small one. Just as the rise of football destroyed the dominance of baseball, but they are still both sports.
The fracturing of the arts is perhaps a cultural shift, in that nothing has the prominence and dominance the big forms used to. But a switch from one art to another doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.
I think that poetry basically started out as song lyrics and then was split out into its own art by people who sort of enjoyed literary puzzles or who simply weren’t very talented musically. Personally, I think that minus the music poetry is just literary sudoku. That’s pretty off-putting.
As lyrics, poetry is good because it is engineered to evoke a certain scene or idea quickly. Songs are meant to be end fairly quick, so it’s expected that you’re going to have to distill everything down to its essence. If someone enjoys the song and is interested in the lyrics, then it is sort of fun to try and work out what the writer intended. That’s great, but it’s not really the major focus of the pursuit.
But minus the song, you’re left with something that isn’t inherently entertaining. There’s no good yarn being spun. A single poem might evoke a nice feeling, but it doesn’t fill enough time to really serve as a pastime. Or if you go through a bunch of poems, to try and fill time, then that’s just too many things changing too fast. If each poem is doing a good job at setting the scene, that scene is over and done with in just a minute or two, and suddenly you’re forced into another, completely unrelated scene.
As lyrics, music drags the poetry out so that you have time to get into it and feel satiated and ready for something else by the time it has ended.
So ultimately you’re left with literary sudoku. Sort of fun for a specific subset of people who like puzzles, but not really something engineered for general entertainment.
I’d love it if real poets were writing lyrics though. I ignore lyrics just because if I bothered to hear what the singer was saying, the crappyness of the writing and the idiocy of the ideas behind it would annoy me.
And it worked for Dessa. She’s able to make a decent living and promote her poetry to large crowds of people.
Sage Rat, I agree with a lot you say. And a lot is mirrored in Poe’s essay, “The Poetic Principle”:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/POE/poetic.html
He opined that a long poem is bound to fail:
"I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, “a long poem,” is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
[…]
“There are, no doubt, many who have found difficulty in reconciling the critical dictum that the “Paradise Lost” is to be devoutly admired throughout, with the absolute impossibility of maintaining for it, during perusal, the amount of enthusiasm which that critical dictum would demand. […] After a passage of what we feel to be true poetry, there follows, inevitably, a passage of platitude which no critical prejudgment can force us to admire […].”
Simple etymology supports the first part of your claim. They are called lyrics, because they were accompanied by a lyre. But have we forgotten that music itself was also a mathematical puzzle that was worked out by the very people who invented what we now call math?
[quote=“Aeschines, post:44, topic:720166”]
OMG! Inspired by what you wrote, I just listened to Frost read for the first time:
[/QUOTE]In college, it was a considerable effort on my part to spend time at the library hooking my tape player to their phonograph system to listen to all the old Caedmon recordings of poets reading their verse. It’s all now quite easy to find on YouTube.
I don’t know why Robert Frost is incapable of rendering in his own voice what is clearly encoded in his verse, but he is as famously terrible at performance as he is excellent at composition.
The verse of Dylan Thomas can be appreciated without ever hearing his own powerful recitation. It’s wonderful, and yet I can get a laugh out of anybody whose heard him recite by reciting nearly anything else in the same manner.
This is a travesty! Is he trying to be fucking Scottish?!
It’s not true, and what’s more let us not wish it were true. You have so much choice in recitation among pitch, intensity, speed, pauses, rushes, whispers, affectations and naturalizations that a reader has a tremendous amount of influence over how an auditor takes the meaning of a poem.
A lot of older interests are no longer in vogue in todays fast paced, instant gratification world.
Poetry requires quiet time to think and reflect. Something that almost seems unnatural to todays generation that had game controllers in their hands before they could conjugate a verb.
Yeah. Wow. OMG. Ouch.
I bet. It’s just a weeeee bit overwrought!
Well, it’s true insofar as a template such as “rhymed iambic pentameter” can be recognized in the first place. I agree with you that, even within this template, a poem can be taken in vastly different directions.
Agreed. I do poetry recordings for some online journals, and I’ve had a number of poets tell me how my reading brought out things they didn’t know were embedded in the poem.
That can always be the case, but they had written rhymed iambic pentameter?!
Sometimes, yes. IP does not do anything magical to restrict the reader.
My mother as a very young woman met Dylan Thomas in a lift in London. Apparently he slunk in a corner, rather drunk, and swore at her non-stop.