HOOKED UP
When I was a wee bairn in the late ’70s, a mass-market paperback called The Poetry of Rock was often to be found among the macramé and marijuana seeds. This anthology was a weird little bible to me, its concordances the records that were always lying around with their mystically resonant titles—Aja, The Slider, Sticky Fingers, Dixie Chicken—and glorious gatefolds. I’d pore over lyric sheets the way Harold Bloom claims he immersed himself as a child in Blake and Hart Crane. I first embarked on literary exegesis at seven or eight, trying to understand what it could mean to know “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”
Reading The Poetry of Rock again decades later, I’m impressed by how self-aware it is. I’d assumed I would find it a kitschy cash-in, radio wisdom for the Castaneda set, full of wimpy crap like “The Sound of Silence.” That excretion is indeed to be found within the anthology’s pages, but for the most part, editor Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice was too savvy to fall for the callow philosophizing of folkies like Paul Simon and Phil Ochs. Goldstein says of the latter’s unreadable “Crucifixion” that it is “infuriating in its insistence on expressing everything in allegorical terms.” Meanwhile, interpreting Dylan is like “running a U.S.O. in Hanoi”; Procol Harum’s lyrics “reek of random allusions and post-graduate funk”; “you can almost feel the lurch of brakes between the lines” of the Beatles’ “In My Life.”
For Goldstein, rock “poetry” is about the ability “to express the forbidden within the context of the permissible.” “Poetry” poetry, on the other hand, can sometimes express the forbidden within the context of the forbidden, because it doesn’t aspire to go platinum. (The same could be said of punk, I suppose.) Context is, of course, why the answer to the tedious question “Are lyrics poetry?” has to be “It depends.” Goldstein notes that “mere linearity can destroy a rock lyric,” and claims, despite his anthology’s title, that it’s a mistake to expect pop lyrics “to move like a poem.”
The point is pop music is music, duh, and without the Klaxon and clamor of guitars and beats, the words don’t really rock and roll.
Heard in certain ways, song lyrics are obviously a form of poetry; in other respects, it seems worthwhile to preserve a distinction. I have collections of the lyrics of W. S. Gilbert, Stephen Foster, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim. What would be the point of denying these lyricists the honorific of “poet”? And I can think of songs by Randy Newman (early), Leonard Cohen (late), Laurie Anderson, and Biggie Smalls that I’d have no problem calling poems.
Still, I’ve been stranded in the dead waters of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” or some other well-mannered token in a literature anthology (Morrissey’s execrable “Cemetry Gates” and Mos Def’s “Hip Hop” in the most recent Norton Introduction to Literature) often enough to question the motivation to enshrine these songs. There’s something feebly earnest about anthologies like The Poetry of Rock or Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois’s recent Anthology of Rap. Does Clipse really need to be rescued from the ghetto of popular culture? I’d say anyone who can write like this—“All the snow on the timepiece confusin’ ’em/All the snow on the concrete Peruvian”—is doing fine without Norton’s imprimatur.
Anyway, at least half the force of these lines is in Pusha’s delivery: he shakes each syllable in his teeth to break its spine against the click-clack machine rhythms of the backing track. A great tune, a killer solo, and a perfect beat can render terrible lyrics irrelevant, as Neil Young’s career proves.
Lyrics work best when they aren’t straining to achieve poetic effect (ask Jackson Browne). Springsteen became a great songwriter when he stopped aping Dylan and found the poetry in a “sixty-nine Chevy with a 396 / Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor.” Tori Amos’s best lyric is about wanting to smack Oliver Stone.
At the moment the lyricist who impresses me most is Jason Isbell, formerly of the Drive-By Truckers. Although he wrote some of that Skynyrd-proud band’s best numbers, his first few solo records came on too safe. But the songs on his fourth album, Southeastern, make the music around them on the radio sound like jingles for Discount Carpet Warehouse. Partly that’s because his voice is so idiosyncratically gorgeous that he could sing the surgeon general’s warning on a pack of smokes and make you cry.
But it’s also because of lines like these, from “Different Days”: “You can strip in Portland from the day you turn sixteen / You got one thing to sell and benzodiazepine.” Isbell knows how his lyrics work in ways that have nothing to do with their meaning. “I step into a shop to buy a postcard for a girl” sounds full of emotion on “Relatively Easy,” but why? For one thing, it’s perfectly iambic, with a sonic pileup of ss and ps.
Like the Clipse lyrics above, Isbell’s operate at the phonemic level, sounds picking up and pinging off one another: at “Christmastime” someone’s “woman took the kids and he took Klonopin/Enough to kill a man of twice his size.” Listen to the way “woman” resonates with “Klonopin,” “Chris” with “kids” and “kill,” “time” with “twice” and “size.”
This is what Roger Miller called “hooked up,” as Dave Hickey relates in his entry on “The Song in Country Music” in Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s A New Literary History of America. It’s the single best discussion of song lyrics I know.
When I asked Roger Miller what it was about [Hank] Williams’s songwriting that touched him, he said, “Meticulous. They’re meticulous and all hooked up.” When I asked him what this meant, he . . . sang half a verse of “Me and Bobby McGee,” a song by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster that Miller had discovered and recorded first.
Busted flat in Baton Rouge
Headed for the trains.
Feelin’ nearly faded as my jeans.
“That’s hooked up,” Miller said. “I love the ‘as’ that picks up ‘flat’ and ‘bat.’ ” And “faded” picks up “headed” and “trains.”
Hickey asked Waylon Jennings about Williams’s songs, and Jennings “sang lines from two or three of them and showed me how the sounding of the consonants moved from the front to the back of the mouth so the vowels were always singable.” The songwriter Harlan Howard explained how “eight short lines” of Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart” are “invisibly held together by fifteen internal r phonemes. . . . ‘Nobody notices this,’ Howard said. ‘That’s the idea, but once these words are put together this way, they won’t come apart.’ ”
That’s important: you don’t necessarily attend consciously to these elements in the song; you’re not meant to. They’re glue, holding the verse in your memory, sticking the words to your ears. And just as poets who write in meter don’t need to count off beats on their fingers, because they have internalized the mechanism through long practice, a songwriter can lay these units down without having to plot out the placement of r phonemes as he writes. “Once you learned how to do it, you couldn’t not do it,” Hickey explains.68
This is the most significant way in which songs differ from poems—they’re intended to be heard, while poems for some time have been written primarily for the eye. As Christopher Ricks puts it in his brilliant and annoying Dylan’s Visions of Sin, “the eye can always simply see more than it is reading, looking at; the ear cannot, in this sense (given what the sense of hearing is), hear a larger span than it is receiving. This makes the relation of an artist like Dylan to song and ending crucially different from the relation of an artist like Donne or Larkin to ending.”69
Poems, that is to say, are no less complex than a hooked-up country song (or shouldn’t be—God knows they are, often enough). But a poem’s hooks are spatial in a way a song’s can’t be—you see its ending coming—unless the song is reduced to its printed lyrics, in which case it’s not a song anymore. Lyrics are just one moving part of the machine we call a song—without music and voice, they just sit there, no matter how meticulously crafted they might be. So whether lyrics are poetry is a question that doesn’t require an answer, or has too many to bother wit
h. It’s enough that we have songs—“domestic magic,” Hickey calls Hank’s—and can sing.
VISIBLE REPUBLIC
Gentlemen, he said, I don’t need your organization. And surely Bob Dylan, one of the wealthiest and most successful artists in history, did not require the imprimatur of the Nobel Committee for Literature at the Swedish Academy. Nevertheless, here we were, on the morning of October 13, 2016, arguing about whether it made a lick of sense for a popular songwriter—even the popular songwriter—to be awarded this most prestigious of literary prizes. Was there precedent? There was not: Every single previous winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—even Winston Churchill (1953)—won for writings that were primarily, um, writings.
Twitter was aquiver with approbation and disdain. Stephen King and Salman Rushdie were pro, Hari Kunzru and Gary Shteyngart were anti. I was briefly made livid by something the critic Jody Rosen tweeted: “Cute, but songwriting isn’t literature.” This is not true. “Sir Patrick Spens” is literature. And if the blues is “primarily a verse form and secondarily a way of making music,” as Amiri Baraka wrote in Blues People, surely the same could be said of rap.70
But I soon realized Rosen’s claim was a hyperbolic version of a point I actually agree with, which he clarified in subsequent tweets. Rosen was opposing the notion that popular music needs to be validated by literary honorifics, while I was rejecting the notion that popular music can’t be literary. These positions aren’t mutually exclusive.
And decades after the much-hyped, much-distorted advent of barbarian postmodernism at the gates of the academy, Rosen’s argument is probably the more relevant one. That popular art—film and comics and hip-hop—is no less worthy of sustained intellectual engagement than literature (which is at any rate an amorphous and contested category) is fairly well established by now, despite the fulminations of Harold Bloom. It’s not that pop music doesn’t deserve a Nobel Prize but that pop music doesn’t need it. (And, uh, guys? John Ashbery is still alive.)
Furthermore, if the thing had to be given to a North American musician—and my feeds were filled with folks proposing boring alternatives like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen—why not one of the black pioneers without whom Robert Zimmerman would just be an annoying amalgam of Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac? Chuck Berry, as Rosen suggested, or Little Richard? Or why not Sly Stone? Or if we’re really talking “great poets,” as the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary had it, Rakim or Chuck D or Ghostface Killah?
Well, because demographics, to put it politely. Boomer hagiography of Dylan should be its own Nobel category. Have you heard that Dylan went electric over fifty years ago, and some mope shouted “Judas”? If not, allow me to recommend a few dozen books on the subject. The academics, especially, are full of passionate intensity. Christopher Ricks has written some of the smartest poetry analysis you’ll ever read, and Dylan’s Visions of Sin is very smart. It also sounds like this:
And Dylan is energy incarnate. Energy is Activity. . . . The opposite of slothful? “Diligent” is the opposing term that is everywhere in the Book of Proverbs (which Dylan knows like the back of God’s hand). O O O O that Dylanesque rag. It’s so elegant. So intelligent. So Dyligent. Never negligent.71
The day after the announcement, the Times ran an article I refuse to read with the headline “Bob Dylan 101: A Harvard Professor Has the Coolest Class on Campus.” Dylan has exacerbated this tendency by writing (in addition to some of the best lyrics in the popular tradition) a lot of self-consciously literary gunk (“Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower”—Dad, please, you’re embarrassing me).
But our age is characterized by, in Bifo Berardi’s words, “an excess of speed of the infosphere in relation to the ability of elaboration of the brain,” so instant reactions are demanded, with little or no time for thoughtful reflection.72 In other words, just when I was starting to feel that popular song hardly needed to be defended, the think pieces began to appear. Most were simply banal (the New Yorker invited a bunch of writers to pick their favorite Dylan lyrics). But Stephen Metcalf, writing for Slate, went all in, proclaiming that “Bob Dylan is a musician, not a poet.”73 To prove it, he quoted the poet Richard Wilbur:
The heavens jumped away,
Bursting the cincture of the zodiac,
Shot flares with nothing left to say
To us, not coming back
Followed by lines from Dylan’s “Up to Me” beginning “Oh, the Union Central is pullin’ out and the orchids are in bloom.” According to Metcalf, Dylan’s lines “are colloquial, spare, painterly, and without the accompanying music, inert.” Wilbur’s poem “is poetry,” Dylan’s song is just “lyrics.”
“Colloquial, spare, painterly” could describe some of the best poems in the language, including several by Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorine Niedecker, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Pickard—I could go on and on. If Dylan’s lines aren’t poetry, neither is this, from a poem by Langston Hughes:
My old time daddy
Came back home last night.
His face was pale and
His eyes didn’t look just right.
He says, “Mary, I’m
Comin’ home to you—
So sick and lonesome
I don’t know what to do.”
What Metcalf is really saying, whether he means to or not, is that poetry is about fancy stuff like the cincture of the zodiac, not the Union Central pullin’ out.
It’s no accident that both Dylan and Hughes draw on the blues, which draws on Christian rhetoric, which represented for Erich Auerbach the merging of the high and low styles of classical antiquity. I don’t think Metcalf means to denigrate lyrics as such—there’s nothing wrong with just writing lyrics—and I don’t mean to, either. But the hierarchy he establishes is invidious in itself. Yes, Dylan is a poet—and a musician and a lyricist. “Poet” is just an honorific we grant for different reasons at different times (take a look at how elastic Shelley gets with it in “A Defence of Poetry”).
And yet—so what? Dylan’s honorific-withholding detractors do have a point, one Ellen Willis made best in the pages of Cheetah in 1967: “Words or rhymes that seem gratuitous in print often make good musical sense, and Dylan’s voice, an extraordinary interpreter of emotion . . . makes vague lines clear. . . . The result is a unity of sound and word.”74 It’s the music, the performance. (Willis also wrote that “Dylan’s music is not inspired,” which would be nonsense even if she hadn’t been writing just after the hat trick of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.)
As Albert Murray wrote of blues audiences in Stomping the Blues, as if contradicting Baraka, “most of their goose pimples and all of their finger snapping and foot tapping are produced by the sound far more often than by the meaning of the words.”75 This is what Rosen and Metcalf were getting at, and the argument doesn’t require denying that songwriting can be literature or that songwriters can be poets. The poet Joshua Clover put it like this (also on Twitter): “1. of course songs can be lit 2. Dylan is an astonishing artist 3. it’s not the lit part that makes him astonishing.”
This truth crept into what was by far the best response piece, Greil Marcus’s appreciation in the New York Times. Marcus began by sweeping the problem aside: “But whether Mr. Dylan is a poet—yes, he is being compared right now to Sappho, Homer, the great bards who sang—has never been an interesting question.” He’s right. But that is the question the Swedish Academy raised by giving a literary prize to someone whose words would never have meant so much to so many if they hadn’t been set to such inspired music.
Marcus gets at what is most mind-buckling about the songwriter when he considers a performance of “Highway 61 Revisited” by Dylan and the Band on their 1974 tour (during which they recorded the live album Before the Flood, a colossal document that still renders all criticism two-dimensional):
The song may have reached its most intense pitch in a performance
with the Band in Oakland, Calif., in 1974, when a broken riff from the guitarist Robbie Robertson between verses shot Mr. Dylan’s attack for the final stanza—about staging the next world war between bleachers set up on Highway 61, the road that now runs from Minnesota to New Orleans—into a realm of vehemence, of Watch out! that the song had never known before.76
That’s it, that’s the thing—Dylan isn’t words. He’s words plus Robertson’s uncanny awk, drummer Levon Helm’s cephalopodic clatter, the thin, wild mercury of his voice. Listen to him sing “Blind Willie McTell,” from The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1–3—voice swinging and creaking like magnolia trees in a storm—and tell me that what matters about this man is literature.
Nevertheless, Dylan joins the company of Pearl Buck and William Golding, while Ashbery remains in that of Tolstoy, Henry James, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Borges, Nabokov, James Baldwin, and Chinua Achebe. The single best response to the zomg dylan won the nobel hullabaloo came from the poet Alice Notley, who simply retweeted some Dickinsonian lines she’d posted in 2014:
I gave myself the Nobel Prize for Literature—
Without the check—and also the
Medal of Freedom. I deserved both
of them; & now I have them.
ARE YOU SMEARED WITH THE JUICE OF CHERRIES?
The first line of Robert Hass’s first collection, Field Guide, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1972, is “I won’t say much for the sea.” This offhand repurposing of idiom, funny and insightful, is characteristic of his poems—of course he goes on to say a million things for and about the sea. Field Guide was acclaimed, as each succeeding book would be, for Hass’s facility in translating into poems what is ridiculously referred to as “the natural world.” In the first three poems alone, we find: steelhead, mushrooms, apricots, gulls, sea cucumbers, slugs, a walnut tree, ironwood, waxwings, pyracantha, cliffs, bluffs, artichokes, a salt creek, owl’s clover, lupine, berries, hawthorns, laurels, “clams, abalones, cockles, chitons, crabs,” salmon, swamp grass, and a skunk. The preoccupation with nonhuman life is inextricable from a compulsive onomatomania: “Earth-wet, slithery, / we drifted toward the names of things”; “I recite the hard / explosive names of birds: / egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.” This impulse is explained, sort of, in “Maps”:
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