{"id":109411,"date":"2017-03-30T13:22:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T17:22:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109411"},"modified":"2017-03-31T09:42:37","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T13:42:37","slug":"the-poetry-of-pop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/30\/the-poetry-of-pop\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poetry of Pop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some poets pick some song lyrics worth reading.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Farrah Karapetian, Soundscape 36<\/em>, 2015, unique chromogenic photogram, metallic, 40″ x 45″. Courtesy the artist and Danziger Gallery.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Most of us don\u2019t need a small group of learned Swedes to tell us that Bob Dylan is a poet. We likely forged our opinion on the matter long ago, somewhere between \u201cTalkin\u2019 New York\u201d (1962) and \u201cThunder on the Mountain\u201d (2006). But let\u2019s not stop at Dylan. Why not call all Bobs poets? Bob Marley, Bob Seger, Bob Weir. Add in the Bobbys and Bobbies, too, for that matter: \u201cBlue\u201d Bland, Brown, Gentry. It\u2019s an eclectic group. But if we relinquish the idea that the term \u201cpoet\u201d is a kind of coronation, we\u2019re free to understand it as a descriptive term for someone who works with words in concentrate, which all of these Bobs and Bobbies do.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Dylan\u2019s Nobel Prize in Literature can be a beginning\u2014of closer attention to lyric craft; of richer conversations among songwriters, poets, and the rest of us. The poetry in pop songs can be masterful or careless, disposable or timeless. It can be in the service of well-crafted narratives (like Bobbie Gentry\u2019s \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d) or more abstract tone pieces (like Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead\u2019s \u201cJack Straw\u201d). It can result in works that endure (like Bobby \u201cBlue\u201d Bland\u2019s signature song \u201cTurn On Your Love Light,\u201d covered dozens of times including, famously, by Bob Weir\u2019s Grateful Dead) or works that capture a moment and then recede into nostalgia (like Bobby Brown\u2019s chart-topping 1989 hit \u201cMy Prerogative\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n

In my new book, The Poetry of Pop<\/em><\/a>, I make the case for taking pop songs seriously\u2014without being too serious about it. Few of us first encounter song lyrics on the page as poetry or as sheet music. Instead, we experience lyrics as sound, usually recorded and sometimes live. Page-born poems and song lyrics are not the same things, but they are drawn together by affinities of sound and silence, patterns of language, and shared games with words.<\/p>\n

What follows is a selection from the book\u2019s appendix, which is made up of lists like \u201cFifteen Lyrics that Effectively Rhyme \u2018Moon\u2019 with \u2018June,\u2019 \u201d \u201cSome Whispers, Some Screams,\u201d and \u201cTwenty Epistolary Recordings.\u201d My favorite list is the one included here, in which I asked nine poets to suggest a song lyric that they believe rewards close attention. Their selections span nearly half a century of sound, crossing multiple genres and inviting the kind of interest that will make you pull up a second tab on your web browser and listen to the song for yourself.<\/p>\n

How do poets listen to pop songs? Do they hear things the rest of us don\u2019t? Do they count the rhythms of the lines? Do they separate the half from the full rhymes? Do they feel the song more fully because of their knowledge of the inner workings of syllables and sounds, or does that knowledge get in the way of listening? These nine poets answer affirmatively that poets do, in fact, notice things in song lyrics that might otherwise escape our attention. Their sensitivity and vision can guide us.<\/p>\n

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So read pop songs like poems. Sing poems like pop songs. Both acts may seem unnatural, perhaps even perverse at first. Some parts won\u2019t fit. Some sounds will clash. But the practice brings new clarity and insight. Poetic tools of sound, meaning, and feeling are at work in even the most banal pop song, just as they are at work in even the most trite ode or sonnet. The dance of word and music makes songs act on our imagination and emotions just as the best poems do. Attentive readers, like the nine poets below, unlock mysteries of lyric expression through the poetics of form, as well as through ineffable qualities of voice and music. This is the poetry of pop.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

H. L. Hix picks Bobbie Gentry\u2019s \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d (1967).<\/strong><\/em> It will surely be the most uncool choice in this playlist, and it was long \u201cbefore my time\u201d (I didn\u2019t encounter it until many years after it had disappeared off the charts), but Bobbie Gentry\u2019s \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d brilliantly achieves (in a song that is all lyrics\u2014the guitar just keeps the rhythm) a poetic value I find powerful: subordination of event to situation. \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d seems ostensibly about events: the narrator and Billie Joe throwing something off the bridge, Billie Joe jumping off the bridge, and so on. But although those events get named, they are mostly withheld: we don\u2019t know what the pair were throwing off the bridge, we don\u2019t know why Billie Joe killed himself. What is revealed with utter clarity is the narrator\u2019s situation: she is spoken to and spoken about within the poem, but she herself is never allowed to speak; she is closely monitored (told to wipe her feet, interrogated for not eating, observed and reported on) but not recognized at all; she is kept in place by her society, but is afforded no place in her society; kinship relations are enforced on her from without, but the kinship she feels is denied her. In Gottlob Frege\u2019s terms, \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d obscures reference in order to disclose sense. In Aristotle\u2019s terms, \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d inverts the tragic focus on mythos for a lyric focus on ethos. The narrator makes no explicit criticism of her society, but her implicit critique is devastating. She does not declare her social alienation and erasure, but I feel it all the more strongly for its not being declared. Her protest takes the form of lamentation. I experience \u201cOde to Billie Joe\u201d as a most robust fulfillment of Emily Dickinson\u2019s advice to \u201ctell all the truth but tell it slant.\u201d<\/p>\n