Bob Dylan seemed nonplussed when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature a number of years back, so much so that he sent another poet-musician androgyne, Patti Smith, to Stockholm to accept the award. Alan Ginsberg performed, or "read," to large wild adoring audiences backed by bands like The Clash. Joni Mitchell always thought of herself as a poet, even to the point of ironing the melodies of her "songs" (in "Mingus," for one) down to speech.
John Prine, to his credit, said, "I'm not a poet, I'm a songwriter," when somebody asked him whether he should get a Nobel, like Bob Dylan.
Last weekend's review of a history of Millman Parry and Homeric studies, in the NYT Book Review, reminds me that the line between "poetry" and "song" has always been fragile, readily transgressed. It's not really a line but a convention.
I studied Old English poetry and epic in graduate school. And I studied orality as a literary theory in graduate school. And I've read much of The Iliad and The Odyssey aloud. I haven't decided that poetry is performative and textual at the same time; I have experienced it that way. And that experience has shaped me. I am a speaking animal who interiorized the technology of writing.
For the past few years, as I've worked with my own band to render classic poems back into music, I've begun writing songs. I should say "again." For at least a couple of reasons. For one, I used to write songs. In fact, I think the first "poem" I wrote, at around age 10, was actually a song, or something sparked by a theme song from a Saturday morning TV Western (It was about a cowboy). For another, if you take Millman Parry's ideas into account, all poetry is rooted in song insofar as it starts with sound and rhythm and is performed. So, if I'm writing a poem, historically I'm writing a song anyway - I never stopped writing songs.
But what prompted John Prine to respond as he did to the Dylan Thing is probably the same thing that nags me about songwriting and poetry: the two practices are close cousins but they have different mothers.
Here's a song I wrote recently:
It goes on from there for another two verses ("stanzas," if you will), but you get the idea. It's not rhyme that differentiates this from poetry but nearly every other aspect of the text. The direct, unabashed and almost pleading address makes this a "plaint" in the antique sense of poetry, that is, in a kind of poetry that was once much more closely related to song (Renaissance love poetry, for example; Medieval ballad, for another) than our contemporary American forms, which are more closely related to conversational speech.
The romantic treatment is the stuff of mood and feeling, of Romance, in other words, a gauziness that we don't associate with good poetry today, where we expect to engage ourselves and our motives, our blindness and our insight in more penetrating ways. The "soft themes" of chivalry, open books, secrets, falling skies are not the "hard" stuff of contemporary poetry.
The song's words are vehicles to meaning. They are not "material" as they would be in a poem. Which is to say, they are Rhetoric, not Poetry. And the structural setup of three lines with a repeating fourth is for song. Where poetry uses this kind of repetition, it borrows from song and is therefore less "poetic."
This last point is important to me: what it means to be more or less poetic. For this is not meant as a value statement about poetry. Poems are hybrid things. Since their raw material is language, and since language is made up of words that denote and connote, poems must be part rhetoric and music. And since language - through vocabularies and lexicons, usage and etymology - is historical, subject to change, currency and disuse, "aging," innovation and novelty, poems denote and connote, too. There's no such thing as a "pure poem," for that would be pure language manipulation, as if words bore no common meaning and were nothing more than typology and utterance.
The best poems start from an understanding that language is material that is to be shaped, molded, twisted, torn apart, reassembled and so on in the service of art. A word for this is "making." That was the ancient Greeks' word for it, too. But they don't stop there. They go on to meaning, which is either thought or feeling, or both. To get there, they partake of the same devices and conventions as song.
Still, poetry is an attitude toward language where song is an attitude toward mood or feeling. Apples. Oranges.
No comments:
Post a Comment