A Clash of Verses

Istanbul #2461

Pursuant to some comments the other day on an online book chat group to which I belong, I revisited some of Aleister Crowley’s poetry at Poemhunter. Playing on the stereo in the background was Bob Dylan’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways. Normally I can ignore background sounds when concentrating on some other task, but music and poetry are so closely related that on this occasion they clashed in my head. I turned off the stereo. Yet, that very act also distracted me from Crowley whose verses I also clicked off and will revisit some other time. The question of how the two forms are similar yet different nagged at me instead. It is the sort of question that in order to explore once required a library trip and an immersion in card and microfiche files. It’s a trifle easier now. 

The facile answer, of course, is that songs are sung and are (usually) accompanied by music while poetry (usually) is not. Poems might not be an auditory experience at all but just read on a page. But while that distinction is both obvious and key, there is more to it than that. When reading lyrics, it becomes clear pretty fast that Carol King did something different from Robert Frost. 

To be sure, there is overlap, most obviously in rap (Kanye West’s All Falls Down in original form was a poem he recited at a poetry jam in 2003) and the once-popular recitation songs in C&W (e.g. Ringo by Lorne Greene). Songs and poems alike are verse, and both can impact us with an economy of words that prose can’t match. (The impact is visible on brain scans: See the 2017 NIH paper The Emotional Power of Poetry: Neural Circuitry, Psychophysiology and Compositional Principles.). Indeed, songs are a part of every culture for this reason. The very first literature (not business contracts and tax records, which came earlier, but literature) is poetry. Yet there is a difference. In his acceptance speech for a Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan (though he took the prize money) pretty much told the committee that it had made a mistake: 

“But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”

Matthew Zapruder in The Boston Review said something similar: “Words in a poem take place against the context of silence (or maybe an espresso maker, depending on the reading series), whereas, as musicians like Will Oldham and David Byrne have recently pointed out, lyrics take place in the context of a lot of deliberate musical information.”

There is a history of snobby professors (most often without music skills) valuing poetry over lyrics, which is why one is taught in school while the other generally isn’t. Yet the latter in toto are, if anything, more complex, requiring musical sensibility as well as a facility with words. So, while one can sing a poem or recite a song, something typically feels off about it, as though shoe-horning one art form into another. It is why Steve Allen’s recitation of rock lyrics on The Tonight Show in 1957 still holds up as comedy. What matters is whether the music is integral to the effect – whether you lose something essential by removing it. 

Bob Dylan referenced Shakespeare, which provides a good excuse to use him for illustration. Some of Hamlet's lines were sung in the musical Hair (Will’s iambs make that easy: I once saw a musical Macbeth with a blues score), yet are plainly still poetry. Compare them with Sigh No More, which Shakespeare intended from the beginning to be a song in Much Ado about Nothing. The difference is unmistakable. 

In my case these musings are purely academic, since my own attempts at verses (whether lyrics or poems) always have had clunky results, to put it kindly. (I prefer to talk about myself kindly: one can’t always count on others to do so.) My sister was the poet of the family. I posted some of her verses at Echoes of the Boom. If she ever wrote lyrics, I’m not aware of them. 

In any event, the question now has ceased to nag. It’s time to return to the stereo and Poemhunter – but not both at the same time.

Steve Allen (1957)

Gene Vincent & The Blue Caps - Be Bop a Lula