Re: kafka and rilke

Robbie and Jim,

Uh, I seem to have forgotten the point of the conversation.

Let me review.

Kim asked me who my favorite poets were, and I offered her a list which, at
the end of it, included a note about Tom Waits. She said Tom was different and
could not be part of the poetic canon (it was like apples and oranges)
because the others were poets, but Tom was a "songwriter." I said I didn't think
the distinction made all that much difference practically speaking and that,
although he could certainly never be called "canonical," in the case of Tom there
were a number of spoken word pieces on several of his CD's which, while they
had music in the background, seemed clearly to be poems -- they weren't sung,
some had no strict song like structure, and they made deliberate use of many
of the rhetorical elements we consider as "poetic."

I said, to be precise:

"...(take the long, live spoken pieces on *Nighthawks at the Diner* or even
the title track from *Small Change* or "Potters Field" on *Foreign Affair*).
 So although I don't think he's in any way canonical, I think some of Tom's
writing most definitely can be called, in all senses of the hedgehog term, poetry."

(And then I offered a citation to an essay which discusses hedgehogs and what
is and is not poetry and more precisely what it means to ask such a question,
what it does to the event of the poem, which is something singular, heard or
seen, and which happens, at least in part, in the heart.)

Now, Robbie defined a "song" as "a relatively brief coupling of lyrics and
melody, to be played repeatedly, year after year, in essentially the same
form..." So strictly speaking, most of these pieces I mentioned by Tom would not
then be "songs," since they don't actually couple lyrics to any melody and since
they change, in fact, from performance to performance, and since they are not
even sung. And yet, everyone I know refers to them as "songs on the Waits
CD" or "Tom Waits songs." Tom even calls them "songs."

I've called them "songs" and "poetry."

So either Robbie's definition here is a bit too strict, or we're all just
using the word wrong when we mention these pieces -- which wouldn't really matter
in any meaningful way, since it works anyhow.

In fact, I'm not sure that any of this matters. I think Tom writes poetry.
I think he also writes songs. Sometimes I think he even writes things that
are both. I'm happy that he does. In my heart. Just as I'm happy that
Ferlinghetti and Corso and Ginberg wrote and read and recorded and sometimes even sung
their poetry as well. Just as I'm happy that Keats and Coleridge wrote and
read theirs and that Donne wrote his songs and sonnets and that, apparently,
Shakespeare tried to get a handsome young actor into bed by writing some as well.
It all works for me.

The rest is interesting, but I have nothing really to say about it.

All the best,

--John

(PS: I do know that in Colombia there are certainly some Guajiro songs which
have "coupled lyrics and melody" in brief repetitive ways in essentially the
same form for many hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years. But that
doesn't really matter either.)

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Received on Sun Jun 29 09:42:37 2003