The Washington Post on 'What makes song lyrics poetry?'

Ever since Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature—poets and lovers of literature alike have brought the age-old debate about poetry's relationship to song lyric back to the surface. At the Washington Post, Michael Lindgren brings the discussion to print, with a review of Adam Bradley's new book, The Poetry of Pop. "Bradley’s answer to the dorm-room question is nuanced but unequivocal, and boils down to this: Pop lyrics are not by themselves poetry, but pop songs can be," Lindgren writes. Let's start there:

He does not fall into the trap of treating pop lyrics as technically equal to the heights scaled by great poetry; he understands that “song lyrics need music, voice, and performance to give them life.” He denies the need for “creating a canon of pop lyrics, so that Steven Tyler can sit with Shakespeare,” instead proposing a superb formulation: “Pop,” he writes, “is a poetry whose success lies in getting you to forget that it is poetry at all.”

In the exercise of this principle, Bradley deploys a formidable set of skills. He has an acute ear, dazzling command of seemingly the entire history of pop and a pleasingly wide range of taste, drawing on examples from Gershwin to Guns ’n’ Roses to make his points. His prose has precision and clarity when discussing even the most recondite of literary terms. As with all good teachers, his passion for his subject animates his writing and makes his enthusiasm nearly communicable.

Bradley is what some people would call a “popist,” that is, a critic who sees aesthetic value in commercial pop genres and has an essentially egalitarian ethic — as opposed to a “rockist,” or an old-school (usually white) (usually male) critic prone to hierarchical value judgements. He is, in addition, an unabashed formalist — he studied under the great modernist critic Helen Vendler — who relies on traditional techniques of close reading (an early chapter in “The Poetry of Pop” has an almost comically solemn passage on the importance of accurate transcription). Bradley is thus something genuinely unique: a formalist popist and the founding member of a critical school numbering exactly one.

Continue at the Washington Post.