[New-Poetry] poetry goes pop

[TheOldMole]

Poetry and songs do different things. In my poetry-song assignments for my short story class, one of the things my students found -- not original along the lines of Coleridge or Croce, but a good job by students - was that what songs do, though powerful, is simpler. Essentially on one point, and the point is often fatalism. Stackolee comes up against the devil -- against an inexorable fate. And, they kept seeing, so do all the other characters. The Jack of Hearts is the devil, the fate that Big Jim can't escape. Pat Garrett is the devil, Billy the Kid's inexorable fate. All the Warhol characters in "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" are on a collision course with inexorable fate. But when we got to something like "The Raven," the bird may have been "bird or devil," but he was a lot more, too. His message was inexorable but not simple. We couldn't apprehend it with the same simplicity of focus.

And a poem is more than "the most poetic lines."

That being said, my first and most powerful influence, the writer who first made me aware of what words can do, was Leadbelly.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 2:20 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] poetry goes pop


  Poetry goes pop

  By Eric Lochridge 

  http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2006/05/04/entertainment/news/news02.txt

   

   

  Because it’s National Poetry Month, April seems like a good time to think about the sometimes-fuzzy line between pop lyrics and poetry.

   

  Every so often, you’ll hear someone insist that lyrics are poetry. I know I’ve done it. Often, that someone has been listening to Dave Matthews Band or Coldplay, and he or she will then try to convince you that Dave Matthews’ “Crash” is on par with the best poetry America has produced.

   

  Other people, sometimes influenced by substances other than the written word, will insist that Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd recorded the most poetic lines they ever heard.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  New-Poetry mailing list
  New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
  http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20060504/2b5652d8/attachment.html