Taylor Swift has released his eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. But to what extent is it poetic? Is it possible to read song lyrics as if they were poems, separated from their source material?
In this article, four experts evaluate whether Swift’s latest album lives up to poetry.
Allison Adair, professor of poetry and other literary forms at Boston College, says yes: “My personal opinion is that if someone writes poems and considers themselves a poet, then they are a poet,” she says. “And Swift has shown that she takes it very seriously. She has already mentioned (Pablo) Neruda In his work, he has an allusion to (william) Wordsworthquotes Emily Dickinson as one of his influences.”
He also said that his students had told him that Swift’s B-sides – not her radio singles – tend to be the most poetic, which is also true of poets. “Her best-known poems are the ones that engage people the most, the clearest and, in a way, they don’t always have the mystery of poetry.”
The teacher Elizabeth Scalawho teaches a course on Swift’s songbook at the University of Texas at Austin, says that “there’s something poetic about her writing,” adding that her work in The department of tortured poets refers to a time before print technology when people sang poems. “In the early stages of English poetry, they were inseparable,” he says. “Not absolutely identical, but they have a long and rich history together that is rekindled with Taylor Swift.”
“It is appropriate to speak of every composer of songs as a poet,” he says. Michael Chasarprofessor of poetry and popular culture at Willamette University.
“There are a lot of things that musicians and singer-songwriters can do that poetry can’t,” Adair says, citing melisma, or the ability to sustain a single syllable over many notes, as an example. Or the nature of a song with uplifting production and morose lyricism, which can create a confusing and rich texture. “That’s something that music can do viscerally and poetry has to do in different ways.”
“She could say that her works are poetry,” adds Scala. “But I also think that music is very important: a kind of poetry-plus.”
And the current poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón? “Poetry and song lyrics are not exactly the same (we poets have to make all our music with just words and breath),” he wrote. “But for an icon like Taylor to bring more attention to poetry as a genre is exciting.”
Scala considers that Swift’s influences on The Tortured Poets Department include Sylvia Platha confessional poet who was previously inspired by songs like Mad Woman and Tolerate It.
Fortnight (Fortnight) uses enjambed verses (there is no full stop, no punctuation at the end of each line) and Scala points out the dissonance between the softness of the music and its lyrics, as in the line ‘My mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February’. “It kind of encapsulates boredom with the ordinary and then unleashes a kind of tension and rage at the ordinary in those verses,” he says. In the verses, Swift says, “he exploits the domestic,” and that fights against the music, which is “literary.”
Swift’s lyrics also allow for multidimensional readings: ‘I’ve touched you’ could refer to the physical and infidelity in the song, Scala says, or it could refer to the emotional, like “I’ve moved you.”
Swift has long been playing with rhyme and unexpected rhythm. “She often sets a pattern and doesn’t satisfy it, and that usually happens in a time of emotional pain,” Adair says.
In Fortnight, appears in various ways. Adair notes that the chorus is more syncopated than the rest of the song, meaning that Swift uses many more syllables for the same beat. “That gives it a hurried touch,” she says.
“By rhyming ‘alcoholic’ and ‘aesthetic’, he plays a lot with assonance. Technically it is a vowel repetition of sounds,” he adds. There is also tension in the title Fortnight, an archaic term used for a song with contemporary devices. “There’s an allusion to betrayal, and some of the stuff is hyper-romantic, but a lot of it is kind of flat, unapologetic talk. And that has something poetic.”
“From the perspective of taking advantage of certain poetic resources, these types of trucks become familiar metaphors for one’s own emotional state,” says Chasar of Fortnight.
He says the speaker is “stuck in the past and in a future that could have been,” using a dystopian image of American suburbia as a metaphor and “cultivating a sense of numbness, which we hear in the intonation of the lyrics.”
“But the speaker is so overwhelmed by his emotional state that he can’t think of other associations with political lyrics like ‘betrayal’ and ‘Florida’ and ‘lost in America’ that many of us could,” he says.
Title Fortnight, he adds, “it is totally poetic. It is also a period of 14 days, or two weeks. “For most of us, ‘lost in America,’ means a paycheck.”
“It makes references to Greek mythology,” says Scala, as in cassandra, which is part of a surprise set of songs that Swift debuted. The title refers to the daughter of the king of Troy, who predicted the destruction of the city but she had been cursed so that no one would believe her.
“She is the one who tells the truth. Nobody wants to believe, and nobody can believe,” she says. Swift “thinks in terms of literary paradigms about telling the truth.”
Adair notices So Long, London: from the jingle of high school harmonies that open it to a flat first verse, “calm and domestic,” he says.
“That mismatch is very poetic, because it’s pairing things from two different tonal registers, essentially, and saying that they both have value, and that they belong together: The high-minded and high-tradition type and the casual everyday type. “That’s something the Beat poets also did, redefining the relationship between the sacred and the profane.”
Source: AP
