Poem-Songs

There is perhaps no greater untruth said about poetry than the one that declares - nobody likes poetry anymore. On the contrary, people like poetry more than any other form of language and they like it as much as they ever have. In contemporary mass society, this means song lyrics. Song lyrics are poetry. Most song lyrics are written in rhymed verses. And like every form of literature, the quality of song lyrics spans from the very good to the very bad and in every genre of music: rock, rap, folk, pop, country and beyond (among English language song forms). So, when people say poetry is very unpopular, they mean poetry printed in books and in journals and magazines.

Poetry is still reckoning with the effects of the bifurcation of literature into the spoken and the written. Put another way, poetry is still dealing with the movement of world cultures from the oral to the print-based. The divisions between song/poem and esoteric/popular were far less rigid in oral cultures which used meter, rhyme, assonance, alliteration and wordplay as mnemonic devices for conveying fantastic myths and as accessible forms of play. Nowadays, the distinctions noted above can become overwhelming or alienating. They can produce hermeticism,* cloying preciousness, feelings of "out-of-touchness" and near irrelevance for poetry "on the page" and the divisions can also result in the utter cliché, banality and consumer fetishism found in many song lyrics.

This may be why many of the lyricists and poets we enjoy the most are those who transcend the apparent limitations and avoid the pitfalls presented by each approach to writing poetry. William Blake was fascinating in this regard. He himself printed his own limited editions of his books, including Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. But his writing was very influenced by English nursery rhymes, a wonderful oral poetic form, and legend has it he used to sing his verses while gardening naked in his backyard in London.

*I'm not against hermeticism; I'm only suggesting that it can sometimes result in bad poetry.