Awesome. I just took an English course called "Poetry and contemporary alternative music lyrics." Imagine a poetry class where half the texts are poems from an anthology of great poetic works, and the other half are the lyrics to music by artists like The Mountain Goats. Anyway, The Mountain Goats were on our syllabus, and that's how I discovered them. It was such a fun class. I've always felt that song lyrics didn't get quite enough recognition as meaningful art- they are often, I think, as much poetry as poems are.
Absolutely! Below I have pasted just the section of the syllabus with the texts we read, grouped together by motifs, themes, and styles. Ignore the stuff like quizzes and presentations and other class stuff. I didn't take the time to delete it all out. The abbreviations like "(MP)" or "(c)" after certain poems indicate to the students where we are to find the texts (our book, online, online module, etc). The textbook we used was "The Making of Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms" and it was very good. It was written and compiled by working, published poets, instead of by academics. Anyway, enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions about it! Week 2 : Form and content relationships
W, 1/15 Poems: George Herbert, “Easter Wings” (MP 143); Miller Williams, “The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina” (MP 38-39);. Songs: Cold War Kids, “Hang Me Up to Dry.” Quiz 1. Sign up for 3 possible presentation dates. DMP rep to stop by to explain the resources the DMP offers you. F, 1/17 Poems: George Herbert, “The Collar” (c); Thom Gunn, “The J Car” (MP 133-34). Secondary reading: Fenton, “Where Music and Poetry Divide” (c under “secondary reading”). Quiz 2. Week 3
W, 1/22 Point of view/personae. Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” ” (MP 130-132); The Toadies, “Possum Kingdom”; Portugal. The Man, “Creep in a T-Shirt.” Quiz 3. F, 1/24 Romance/Realism. Poems: Sarah Piatt, “A Lesson in a Picture” (pp); Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory” (c) Songs: Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s, “Real Naked Girls”; The Postal Service, “Clark Gable.” Quiz 4. Week 4: Carpe diem lyrics and variants
W, 1/29 Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (MP 209); John Donne, “The Good Morrow”; Songs: Radiohead, “Nude”; Weezer, “Tired of Sex.” Quiz 5. F, 1/31 Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”; Sharon Olds, “Sex without Love”; Songs: The Smiths, “Ask.” Quiz 6. Presentation: Raybecca Week 5: The not-here
W 2/5 Ideas of heaven. Poems: Emily Dickinson, “’Heaven’—is what I cannot reach!” (#239); Songs: Talking Heads, “Heaven”; Arcade Fire, “Keep the Car Running.” Quiz 7. Presentation: Sophia
F, 2/7 The Romantic dream. Poems: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” Songs: Wild Nothing, “Live in Dreams” and “Take Me In”; Animal Collective, “What Would I Want? Sky.” (All Animal Collective lyrics are available on the band website, animalcollective.org.) Quiz 8. Presentation: Jack
DMP workshop #1: GarageBand. Meet in our regular classroom. After the quiz, those taking the workshop will head to a DMP room tba. Week 6: Cameron McGill
All selections this week are preparation for our videoconference with working musician and published poet Cameron McGill, of two bands (Cameron McGill and Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s; see cameronmcgill.com for info). The lyrics for the new record (just out in Dec.), Gallows Etiquette (GE), are posted on Carmen--sent to this class by the artist himself! W, 2/12 Side 1 of GE; Secondary reading: Katie Darby Mullins, Editor’s Note, Measure 7.2 (2002): vii-viii (attached to syllabus); Cameron McGill, “Haiku Cycle” (published in Measure; attached to syllabus); Cameron McGill, “Three Poems,” Split Lip Magazine 9 (Jan.-Mar. 2014) (c). The three individual poems are titled “Heart-Sowing,” “In the Waiting Room,” and “If the Mayans are right” Quiz 9. Presentation: Laura F, 2/14 Side 2 of GE; Cameron McGill, three poems from Poetry East (2013): “I Fall Asleep Like Lions,” “Painted Dolls,” and “Broken Guns.” Today you must also hand in, during class, a word-processed list of six videoconference questions for our 2.19 videoconference. Here is the assignment: Develop a list of six questions to ask Cameron McGill next week. It works best in these videoconferences to mention a particular song or poem by the artist; quote lines; then present your interpretations to which he can respond. At least three of your six questions should be about interpreting the language from particular songs. They do not all have to be songs we discussed in class—feel free to range more broadly in his work on your own. Your other questions may be about topics in music and poetry more broadly. Bring a copy of your questions to the videoconference, and attach to it the lyrics of the songs you ask about so you have them when you need them. Not all his lyrics are fresh in his mind; you will want to quote the lines you are referring to when you pose your question. Each of your questions should fully develop an idea to which he can respond. Your interpretive questions should be about 3 sentences in length. Quiz 10. Week 7
W, 2/19 Videoconference with Cameron McGill. Bring a copy of your questions to the videoconference, and attach to it the lyrics of the songs you ask about so you have them when you need them. F, 2/21 Youth, Pressure, Escape. Poems: Sarah Piatt, “The First Party” (pp); William Stafford, “Fifteen” (c). Songs: Neutral Milk Hotel, “The King of Carrot Flowers, Part One”; Beirut, “Elephant Gun.” Quiz 11. Presentation: Max Kilcup
DMP workshop: iMovie. Meet in our regular classroom. After the quiz, those taking the workshop will head to a DMP room tba. Week 8 Intimacy and Its Perils
W, 2/26 Poems: Marilyn Hacker, “Villanelle” (MP 16-17); Songs: Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”; The Antlers, “Two.” Quiz 12. Presentation: Ivy F, 2/28 Poems: John Keats, “Bright Star” (MP 62); Christina Rossetti, “From Monna Innominata” (MP 63); Songs: Death Cab for Cutie, “Brothers on a Hotel Bed”; Bon Iver, “Blood Bank.” Quiz 13. Presentation: Michaela Week 9 Disconnections
W, 3/5 Poems: Walt Whitman, “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” (c) and “To a Stranger” (c); Stan Rice, “The Strangeness” (c); Songs: The National, “Green Gloves.” Quiz 14. Presentation: Kent F, 3/7 Poems: Louise Bogan, “Tears in Sleep” (MP 188) The Mountain Goats, “Moon Over Goldsboro” (attached to syllabus in its form as a poem by John Darnielle, from Measure). Quiz 15. Presentation: Cody SPRING BREAK, 3/10-14 Week 10 Alienation & “Modern Man.”
W, 3/19 Poems: T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (c); Songs: Arcade Fire, “Modern Man”; The Antlers, “The Universe is Going to Catch You.” Quiz 16. Presentation: Max Orr F, 3/21 Edwin Arlington Robinson, “The House on the Hill” (MP 9); Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” sections I and II (c). Songs: The National, “Mistaken for Strangers”; Modest Mouse, “Missed the Boat”; ”; Wavves, “Convertible Balloon.” Quiz 17. Presentation: Isiah Week 11 The poetic image; or, What’s a Poem to Do?
W, 3/26 Poems: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam” (sections LIV and LV) (c); H.D., “Oread” (c); Songs: Radiohead, “Kid A.” Quiz 18. Presentation: Joey F, 3/28 Michael Davidson, “Et in Leucadia Ego” (pp); Paul Hoover, “Poems We Can Understand” (pp); Animal Collective, “Peacebone.” Quiz 19. Presentation: Richard Week 12 Parents
W, 4/3 Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” (MP 150); Weldon Kees, “After the Trial” (MP 36); Sufjan Stevens, “Romulus.” Quiz 20. Presentation: Devin F, 4/5 “Intention” v. “intentional fallacy.” Andrew Bird’s essays, “How’s My Living?” (c) and “Words Will Tell” (c); Andrew Bird’s songs, “Oh No” and “Not a Robot, but a Ghost.” Quiz 21. Presentation: Hilary Week 13
W, 4/10 Sex and/or Love? Poems: Sharon Olds, “Sex without Love” (c); Metric, “Poster of a Girl”; Wild Nothing, “Vultures Like Lovers.” Quiz 22. F, 4/12 Daily Life. Poems: Jackson Mac Low, “Daily Life” (pp); William Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” (MP 61); Songs: Animal Collective, “Daily Routine.” Quiz 23. Presentation: Caroline
Kid A was certainly challenging. Our instructor said that she personally thinks Kid A was written to be read and approached like language poetry
Okay. At the risk of wasting a bit more of your time, that page didn't give me a great handle on what "language poetry" means. So there's more, right? I continue reading. But seriously, this sentence -- -- links to a) nature, about the physical universe; b) disjunction, a logic theory page; c) materiality, which is subject theory mind/matter stuff; and d) signifier, which is an in-depth semiotics page. That's a hilarious/ridiculous vintage Wikipedia sentence. It rather dances around educating me about language poetry.Language poetry emphasizes the reader's role in bringing meaning out of a work.
Certain aspects of the writing of language poets became strongly associated with the members of this group: writing that challenged the "natural" presence of a speaker behind the text; writing that emphasized disjunction and the materiality of the signifier; and prose poetry, especially in longer forms than had previously been favored by English-language writers, as well as other non-traditional and usually non-narrative forms.
Aha you're right. That's a terribly unsatisfying description. I won't pretend to be an expert on language poetry, but here's what I remember learning in class: Language poetry has two big defining characteristics that stick out to me distinctly. First, it does indeed place huge emphasis on the reader. In practice, this means that the author gives the reader very little to work with. Usually this means poems with no context, a lack of coherence, language and sentences that don't seem to make any sense, etc. The idea is that the reader does all the work in giving the poem meaning. There is nothing, or little, that can be deciphered in these poems. Instead the focus is heavy on creating something unique between the text and each reader. The idea is that the poem will spark something different or special for everyone. The author, in fact the idea that any person is behind the poem and dictating it is as removed as possible in order to facilitate this. The second primary characteristic is that a lot of language poets like the idea that poetry should not be slaved over, meticulously crafted, or even deliberately written. They do things like create poems by literally copying a newspaper article word for word, and inserting line breaks and new punctuation to give it new meaning. A great example is the poet Jackson Mac Low, who created a poem called "Is That Wool Hat My Hat?" According to an interview we read for class, Mac Low was at a show where he overheard one person ask another the question, "Is that wool hat my hat?" The phrase stuck out to him. He assigned each word a number between 1 and 6, and rolled a die a lot of times to determine in which order the words should fall. Each line of the poem is the same six words in a randomized order. He wrote it as a performance poem for four people to present together, each one chanting his/her own unique set of lines of the same six randomized words simultaneously for a few minutes. I found a video here! It is kind of madness, but that is indeed how it was written to be performed. I have a copy of pages form Mac Low's own book with the very instructions, which I can post when I get home in about a month. So anyway, the point is that the phrase itself holds almost no meaning, and took a few minutes of dice rolling to create, but meaning is created in the moment that people perform it together. Because language poetry is often non-compositional, like jumbled up newspaper articles or phrases thrown together by rolling a die, many academics and poets regard it with disdain. They view it as anti-art, and not as poetry at all. It is a controversial subject. The professor who taught this class, however, thinks language poetry is very fun, and is a big fan of how it works. She is currently compiling an anthology of poetry for undergrads studying the English. She has actually included a lot of song lyrics, including "Kid A." She said that the song lyrics and the language poetry is where she has encountered the most resistance with her publisher. I believe the book is to be released this month. Personally, I find language poetry frustrating. I really like the idea behind it, but I always find myself annoyed and as though I haven't come up with much. Maybe I should keep trying, or maybe it just isn't for me. I think this makes the Wikipedia article a little bit clearer. The style emphasizes disjunction because there is an intentional disconnect between reader and author, between sentence structure and how we usually speak, between the idea that poetry is crafted and what the poet is giving you, and indeed between each word and line of the poem. It is all very disjointed and feels unnatural or unintuitive. These poems focus on materiality and the physical world in that they distort everyday things like questions about hats and newspaper articles. I'm not so sure about the rest though. I hope this gave you a little bit of a better handle on language poetry. When I get back home (I'm studying abroad right now) I will be able to get into my folder from the class and provide you with more examples if you'd like! But right now I'm having trouble finding/remembering the poems and poets.
This is very interesting. lil are you following this thread? This is my knee-jerk reaction. I'm watching that video and ... I mean if I needed something to make fun of people who get degrees in poetry ... it would be mean, low-hanging fruit. So one side of me is like, come on. The other side is in the "just about everything is art" camp, or that everything's subjective and down to interpretation. I was reading an interview with a writer once, I think it might have been Gabriel Garcia Marquez but that's probably wrong, where he said that as a youth he started writing poetry -- but he stuck to rhymed poetry because everything else felt like cheating. Most of the time when I write poetry I feel that way, even if I shouldn't. So if skipping out on a rhyme feels like cheating, banging on a table is probably grand larceny. Kid A is one of my favorite albums, but I'm not sure how much the lyrics add.Because language poetry is often non-compositional, like jumbled up newspaper articles or phrases thrown together by rolling a die, many academics and poets regard it with disdain. They view it as anti-art, and not as poetry at all.
I'm on the same page as you with language poetry. I'd hate to be one of those people who declares that this or that isn't art or holds no value, but...man. The wool hat video just seems so...silly! I feel embarrassed that I've studied that poem it in the same class that I've studied George Herbert and Thom Gunn.
Oh and some of the poems are obscure or difficult to find (i.e. Cameron McGill and Stan Rice). I may still have PDF's or links to many of them if you are interested in reading them but cannot locate them online or through a database. So let me know.
Great list. Thanks for posting it - lots of new alt music to discover. Good for your teacher for creating an approach to literature through modern music lyrics and recognizing modern music lyrics as literature. I've always felt that song lyrics didn't get quite enough recognition as meaningful art- they are often, I think, as much poetry as poems are.
Absolutely. Did you have to write something for this course?
We did, yes. We started with a brief 2-page close-reading of a set of lyrics. Then we wrote a short paper (5-6 pages) on a song or poem of our choice from the first section of the syllabus, and our final project was a 10-page paper on 2-3 related songs of our choice or poems of our choice. We could also write comparatively about a song and a poem, do a creative response (in the form of a song or poem, or music video) and write a 6-page paper explaining it. I chose to write the longer paper because I mostly want to improve my writing skills, and the professor is incredibly helpful. She encourages us to to come weekly to office hours and she goes over our papers with us over and over, giving lots of concrete feedback on our writing. We also had weekly quizzes, and twice we video-conferenced with working musicians/poets. For the conferences, we had to come up with lists of six analytical questions regarding the work of the artists. The questions were graded as small papers as well. The opportunity to talk to the artists for two hours about their lyrics or poetry was incredible.
Yeah, absolutely! I had not realized how much meaning and careful writing I was missing by listening mostly passively to many artists. When I sat down and slowly and deliberately did close readings of songs, I found all sorts of new pleasure in artists that I have been listening to for years. I found that many writers employed lots of poetic devices, recurring images, symbolism, intricate metaphors, double meanings, clever word play, recurring images, and poetic tropes. There were even some that seemed to be very conscious of form, using enjambment and following patters in meter. Some artists have particularly cryptic lyrics, like Alt J and even The National, and I had previously not bothered to dig through them. But I found it very rewarding to discover deeper-than-surface-level content in the lyrics, and I feel that I get more out of the songs this way. Though I'll admit, I often neglect to be so deliberate, as it is often hard to find the time and motivation to sit down and pour over song lyrics. At the same time, I found that some of my favorite artists have rather shallow lyrics that don't hold up well under a close reading. That's OK. Their music isn't worse, their lyrics just seek to accomplish something different than the lyrics of artists who write extremely consciously.
mk music gone?Yeah, absolutely! I had not realized how much meaning and careful writing I was missing by listening mostly passively to many artists.
The rhythm and musical effects distract us from the "meaning" of the words. I think thenewgreen would be interested in your comments given that he is a thoughtful songwriter. Meanwhile, every The New Green song previously available on hubski, seems to have been eaten: https://hubski.com/pub?id=130108
Very cool. I ought to give those songs a listen!
lil, thank you for the mention, I appreciate it. I've always been a fan of lyrics from an early age but mostly because I was writing songs. I've been in bands that played "originals" since I was 12 years old. I recall sitting around a small table, eating pizza with bandmates trying to collectively craft lyrics at 16. The words were MUCH different back then. Lot's of focus on rhyming and coolness. Later, I realized that the reason the words were so hard to come by was because I was thinking to much about the recipient of the words and wasn't focused on what I needed to say. Now, I allow the lyrics to just happen (at least when I can) and don't "try" so hard. There are times that I will sit down and craft lyrics deliberately but it rarely leads to something worthwhile imo. I once decided to write a song around a single word. You know... like "Yesterday" by the Beatles. I came up with Almost. -That's a song I "crafted." Then there are songs that just happen like Grow Up -much more earnest imo. But yeah, I really love lyrics.