Chekhov's Mistress
Poetry vs Pop Music
From J.S. Renau in the Contemporary Poetry Review (”A New Literary Government”):
We all will have our favorites, no doubt, but I suspect most of us (under duress, perhaps) would admit that certain lyrical passages found in popular music are more moving, poignant, and sublime than the vast wasteland of American poetry of the same period [since the 1960s]. With all due apologies to the Robert Pinskys and Jorie Grahams of the world, when honesty overtakes me, I must admit that I would take Paul Simon’s “One and one-half wandering Jews” (“Hearts and Bones”) or his “bomb in the baby carriage / was wired to the radio” (“The Boy in the Bubble”) over any poem of the same period, and I’m not much concerned whether such an admission makes me seem silly or what have you.
Renau’s article is a review of a panel discussion with Stephen Burt, Adam Kirsch, Meghan O’Rourke, and David Orr (and moderated by Deborah Garrison) at the Housing Works Bookstore Café, April 10. I’m sorry I missed it.
My first impression when reading that above quoted paragraph was an ineloquent WTF, but Renau ends with this:
Without the discipline of songcraft, you’ll likely end up with a bit of prose chopped up to approximate verse and expect folks to ooh and aah over this breath pause or that line break. In short, rhythm matters and meter matters, but you really won’t learn how or why from contemporary poetry. For that, a deep draught of the tradition is needed, not so you can then replicate it, but so you can use it as a jumping-off point in crafting something of relevance to folks beyond the small world of workshop instructors and literary critics.
I think that’s right on and I’ve talked about the importance of music to a writer (of any kind) here before. However, Renau seems to be saying that you can’t get anything like that from contemporary poetry and I disagree. If you say you don’t get anything like 1960’s pop music in contemporary poetry, then that’s right – maybe you have to go back to Auden for that – but this isn’t the right measure. Songcraft doesn’t have to be as simple as a pop song to be memorable, which is really the point of the sonic level of poetry in the first place.
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