poet or lyricist?

The mistake most people make is to consider song lyrics as poetry. Sometimes this is correct. But more often the lyrics in pop music (the lyrics of the best lyricists) are better heard as drama.

i dont know what im talking about.

Great thread. Who are some lyricists in popular music who have had the "poet" label attached to them at some point or another? I mean, close to the extent that someone like Bob Dylan has, where his lyrics occasionally show up in high school English texts to show how lyrics can be analyzed as poetry. Who else is there? Patti Smith? Leonard Cohen?

We listened to Hejira by Joni Mitchell at our record club last night, and lyrics were talked about a lot - Hejira's lyrics are very dense, and the song structures don't feature refrains or choruses or repeated lyrics pretty much at all. It seemed to us to be closer to what one would call poetry than song lyrics.

Scott Walker is another example. A lot of hip hop, obviously.

I'll mention Peter Hammill. He's done poetry readings of his lyrics.

When people call a great lyricist a "poet" it's like calling a great chef an "artist". It's meant to be an intensifying compliment, it doesn't mean that songwriter also publishes poetry, although that is sometimes the case.

of course this is stupidly insulting of songwriting and cookery

Exactly, they're different disciplines.

Which isn't to say there's not a valid discussion to be had about lyrics-as-poetry.

But saying that, I already think an awful lot of music criticism is thinly-masked introductory literary criticism.

i'm not even sure if for lyricists who don't play an instrument well the disciplines are much different, i'd argue the difference between a poet and a lyricist is mainly a pragmatic one

and the discussion about lyrics as poetry is mainly pragmatic for me too. these are not different things. they are used differently and served up mainly in different contexts.

a lot of arts criticism in general has been thinly-veilied literary criticism in the past. you can trace a history for most branches of culture where criticism has tried to move beyond literary explication to a practice that addresses the specificity of the art-form it's trying to critique

of course some people will always want to be "reading" what they criticise but that may be a problem of language as much as of apprehension

feel like in rock traditionally 'poet' gets applied most regularly to the poetes maudits - late-Romantic outsider rebels, often self-consciously claiming a place in a fairly narrow canon of poets-on-paper (Rimbaud, Blake, Beats).

ie Pete Doherty

There's a strain of quite literary songwriting that I am a sucker for - lexical inventiveness, syntactical complexity and enjoyment of rhyme/form (eg Cohen, David Berman, Nick Cave, Merritt, Momus) - but it slips into archness or hollowness v easily; & recorded music maybe favours a committed or fragmentary arrestingness rather than the well-wrought verbal urn of this sort.

But then I s'pose poetry has an uncomfortable relation to song - the book poem is a rhythmic verbal artifact w/ its own irrational vowel-music, & has developed its own logic, but it's got roots in song & often seems to try to recover that or declare itself independent + different.

Sry for incoherence, sick as a dog today. Interesting topic.

plenty of poets - Bunting being the example clearest in my memory cos he seems like such a loveable old sod - have insisted that their work can only be fully appreciated by being read out loud, preferably with the right accent. of course this isn't the same as lyricism tho.

*ALL* poetry should be read out loud... all verse, anyway.

Ezra Pound to thread

yeah, my analytical head thinks the insistence on orality (& in a lot of cases, musicality) is a very romantic-modernist drive - the mystic-bardic thing that Graves and Yeats have going (and iirc Pound with the troubadors, get-your-vowels-right stuff). & back to 'Lyrical Ballads' I guess, two kinds of song-iness in the title.

that was an xp

Yeah, I think of poetry as a performative genre / medium, not really a written/read one.

*ALL* poetry should be read out loud... all verse, anyway

because the voice = presence?

i'm not buying that big ALL, sorry

we'd need to start a purge tbh.

gbye Apollinaire, up against the wall Cummings

Easter Wings ≠ poem :(

does this mean Japan & China barely has a poetry?

at work so brief opinions4u about this

1. whole poetry shd be respoken thing is romantic/primitivist balls. if anything i tend to think the opposite - poetry shd be written and not heard (ok, not really, but recitatives and spoken poetry v different animal to written form - I prefer the latter).

2. i feel like attacking any shade of meaning to this comparison where poet is seen as somehow better than lyricist, or lyricist is is measured on continuous scale with 'poet' at the top.

3. Often but not always find the self-consciously poetic in music superproblematic - Dave Berman might be a good example there, tho I like a lot of what he does. Pete Hammill is an example of a self-consciously 'poetic' lyricist that I find successful.

whole poetry shd be respoken thing is romantic/primitivist balls

oh there's the exact words i was looking for

Good points from Fizzles

There ought not to be any hierarchical bullshit btw lyricists and poets, but same as composers vs. film composers, there's gonna be it. Poetry is written to exist w/out any musical accompaniment so it's somehow "more elevated"? I dunno. What is Robert Ashley? A composer, a poet or a lyricist?

like i said, the only useful definitions here are pragmatic. anybody who wants to impose totalising definitions here is playing with themselves, probly literally

Agree with NV and the Fizz

Writers reading their works holds for interest to me whatsoever

Good discussino, but this has gotten way more complicated than the original revive :/

xps to fizzles

yeah, basically strongly agree - I'm probably more ambivalent on point 1, just because arrangement of sounds, physicality of sound mean that there is something irrationally powerful in the music of poetry that can get lost on the page, but really the poem read internally, heard and held in conversation with oneself is what I love. That interiority, density & play with ironies is enabled by print & the silent poem maybe.

2 is straight up otm (I mean I assume we'd both be thinking of MES as example of lyricist who def isn't writing page-poetry but destroys any such poet-above-lyric-writer scale).

there's something to be said for hearing some poets reading their poetry - Plath feels right, Bunting has a lovely voice - but on the other hand Pound reading his own stuff sounds like a piss-take to me and Eliot had a voice for silent movies

'no, but you have to listen to the words'. single most offputting thing someone can say about a song.

if you have to listen to the words i'm going to write you off as music

Polly wants a cracker
I think I should get off her first
I think she wants some water
To put out the blow torch

Isn't me, have a seed
Let me clip your dirty wings
Let me take a ride, cut yourself
Want some help, please myself

Got some rope, you have been told
Promise you, I have been true
Let me take a ride, cut yourself
Want some help, please myself

Polly wants a cracker
Maybe she would like some food
She asked me to untie her
A chase would be nice for a few

Isn't me, have a seed
Let me clip dirty wings
Let me take a ride, cut yourself
Want some help, please myself

Got some rope, you have been told
Promise you, I have been true
Let me take a ride, cut yourself
Want some help, please myself

Polly said

Polly says her back hurts
She's just as bored as me
She caught me off my guard
Amazes me the will of instinct

Isn't me, have a seed
Let me clip dirty wings
Let me take a ride, cut yourself
Want some help, please myself

Got some rope, you have been told
Promise you, I have been true
Let me take a ride, cut yourself
Want some help, please myself

what do u mean by that post? can't work out whether its sarcasm, cynicism, or honest to goodness exemplar of pewtry.

2 is straight up otm (I mean I assume we'd both be thinking of MES as example of lyricist who def isn't writing page-poetry but destroys any such poet-above-lyric-writer scale).

staggering around my room drunk to Australians in Europ atm >>>> poetry.

I think, feeling all not-drunk and much more fair-minded this morning (and not overkeen to use words like exemplar), that I am still curious, and without any side at all, about what the intention behind that KC quote was.

2 is straight up otm (I mean I assume we'd both be thinking of MES as example of lyricist who def isn't writing page-poetry but destroys any such poet-above-lyric-writer scale).

see, my immediate answer was yep, straight up, but on reflection I'm not sure. reading through his lyrics book this morning reminded me how much his lyrics reveal themselves on the page. Smith favours obscurity of course, in his delivery - which deliberately exploits ambiguity of interpretation -, in his lack of conventional publishing of lyrics in liner notes, and in his own deliberately misleading or tangential interpretations. As a consequence of all this reading his lyrics on the page can have a surprising force - they work differently denuded of distinctive vox, but retaining his often delicate mental sensibility, sense of beauty etc, but also the great energy and wit inherent to his writing, and not purely a function of the remarkable voice and music.

the other thing that struck me while reading the lyrics book is actually how the collage and pictorial presentation of the lyrics shows how important the pictorial quality is to his composition (I'm not here talking about the striking visual images within the writing, but the form on the page.). The scrapbook and cut up and paste approach, around local newspapers for example, is the most obvious example of this, but by no means the only one.

This is, in a broad manner of speaking, poetry - broad but not outside the poetic tradition. I was going through Peter Reading's volumes of collected poems (woof, you put me on to him - thanks for that) he sometimes uses a trick of typographically degrading or disintegrating text, which you can also find within the Fall lyrics book. One thing this definitely reinforces is to be wary of definitions of high and low, a motives as a way to deciding whether one is formal experimentation, because by a poet, and the other an accident of an inartistic or indifferent approach because in a pop or rock song (a point I felt was exemplified in the '50s poll by comparing the similarities of Stockhausen and Nervous Norvous' Transfusion - a song Smith has successfully covered). Smith has himself formalised an aural version of this degradation of the medium, captured accidentally in a poor recording of Perverted by Language, where the previous takes were audible below the final cut - he often subsequently made this a deliberate feature of composition.

Peter Reading and MES are similar in other ways, both proponents of the unique virtues of art, unpragmatic in that sense, they possibly share the necessary corollary of that - a cynicism about those unique virtues that does not allow philosophical questions about lasting worth and point of it all to go begging or unexamined in their work. Formal crystalline purity is general not to be found, tho sometimes essayed.

Exploration of the physical nature of form are a 20th century strand of poetry (tho not uniquely 20th century, as the number of formal games and experiments with shape in pre-18th C poetry). There is then a poetic tradition in which Smith's poetry can be placed.

of course he's not really lyrical only a lyricist by that great elasticity of the term that music gifts to words and it's that elasticity and versatility that using "poetry" as anything other than a slightly awkward indicator of certain qualities does so much to undermine.

all of this really only serves to emphasise NV's point about the need not to be dogmatic about these terms, and MES is very clearly a complex edge case, and not just in the matter of this.

Peter Reading did also sum up one v annoying aspect of poetry readings for me:

The sham-coy simpler
the complacency
the frisson titters
the sycophancy.

When people call a great lyricist a "poet" it's like calling a great chef an "artist". It's meant to be an intensifying compliment, it doesn't mean that songwriter also publishes poetry, although that is sometimes the case.

― i hold the kwok and you hold the kee (flamboyant goon tie included), Thursday, February 28, 2013 11:31 AM (Yesterday)

I'd just like to say that, while I accept this is possibly/probably the case when a lot of people describe lyrics as 'poetic' or lyricists as poets, I definitely don't subscribe to the idea that poetic lyrics are on some kind of higher artistic plain than, y'know, a half-melody guide vocal that's just vowel sounds. It's a taxonomical distinction for me rather than a hierarchical one.

*sham-coy simper

fuckin phone.

xpost

yeah, seems fair as a taxonomic term, and I don't think there's much to object to there, other than perhaps an awkwardness around what it's describing, plus potential confusion with the more qualitatively-loaded uses.

i can't remember if Smith always keeps his lyric book on a lectern on stage - or at least uses this as a prop - but he's clearly signifying the writerly aspects of his craft when he does this

hope this doesn't go hueg, but i thought it might amuse at least some people itt:

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/img001_zps3072e19c.jpg
http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/img002_zpscdcd0051.jpg
http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/img003_zpsbc3832c1.jpg
http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/img004_zpsc5c85d59.jpg
http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/img005_zps2ef6d87e.jpg
http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/img006_zps0993444d.jpg
http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/img007_zps881095ea.jpg
http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/img008_zpsdfa7c9f1.jpg

What is that? Is that the MES lyric book?

Points taken on MES - agree that he's a complex edge case & connects to all sorts of literary & para-literary traditions (some of which aren't poetry per se - mechanic preachers, ranter tracts of the 1640s, William Burroughs narratives) and that there's a history or version of c20th (+ beyond) poetry that's about trying to find and use those complex edges (& post-war, this is maybe this accelerated by popular music occupying some of the emotional/public spaces that poetry filled in c19th?), & he does fit in there. So yeah, it does become a question of how we're defining poetry & it quickly becomes clear that, as per you & NV, trying to draw lines becomes a slightly futile exercise, unless we're aware of their contingency.

I've got to take stuff out and tidy stuff up apparently, but quickly, also on the side of collapsing the distinction, should say that tons of the big c16th-c17th poetry anthology pieces are written as actual songs for music - not only eg Campion, but Shakespeare's and Jonson's songs from the plays - ie good part of the English poetry-on-page tradition rooted in song lyric, & things don't fit neatly. (feel like maybe poetry's belief in its autonomy & consequent awkwardness about/fetishisation of music takes place as poets stop working for the theatre, no longer write songs so frequently)