Re: kafka and rilke

In this "songwriter cs poet" discussion, where do people like Tanita Tikaram
fall? Tanita was a successful ,poet who put later put her poems to music, a
rather common thing during the beatnic & hippie generations, as I believe
has been mentioned.
tina

.
>
>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 12:40:26 2003