Reading Joanna Fuhrman's wonderful Pageant recently, I came across these lines in a poem titled "The Summer We Were All Seventeen" (which begins "It was 1968."):
Dear Radio,
we love you
even though
we all know
you're a big-time phony--
we call you
the secret hiding place
of rock and roll,
but we all know
the real
rock and roll
invented
by Arthur Rimbaud
with flaming tabourines
and multi-breasted albino
oranges
you crushed
years ago,
destroyed with your
beautiful
fangs.
These lines struck me because, as someone who once sang for a number of bands and then switched to poetry, I wonder about the relation of rock to its non-commercial, separated-at-birth twin, the modern poem.
Early on in my poetry life, like a lot of young poets I suppose, I was concerned about poetry reaching out to a wider audience, like music did -- pop, indie or otherwise. In a review (Parnassus, Spring/Summer 1981) that included one of my early books, poet/critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote:
"When Taylor Mead, the veteran New York underground zany, first heard Bob Dylan perform at a Village coffeehouse in the early Sixties, he is supposed to have said, 'The Poets have had it.' It was true. With the rise of intelligent pop songwriting, the art of unaccompanied language lost its purchase on social reality; the reality people live and need to have feelings about -- feelings that require articulation. The contretemps was sudden, because in the early Sixties the prospect of poetry as a public medium had been growing in America and internationally as never before. All the air went out of that in a hurry. (I recall with pain the recurrent spectacle of Allen Ginsberg -- our Allen -- paying obsequious court to Dylan.)"
The point Schjeldahl made here is that the more public aspects of poetry were being threatened, not by bad pop music (the old dumbing-down argument), but by good. Rock intellectuals, as it were, had replaced poetry intellectuals on the public stage. Is this because, as Fuhrman's lines suggest (in my reading at least) that rockers/radio fed on the rebelliousness of the poem, commercializing its thunder?
In any event, Schjeldahl's ideas back then proved pretty prophetic. The 80s and 90s were filled with debates about whether "poetry can matter" (to paraphrase Dana Gioia). The whole Slam/Spoken Word/Performance scene seems in some ways to have arisen out of an effort to make poetry speak, once again, to a more socially expansive idea of "the people."
And, the great seriousness with which rock lyrics were now taken produced some hilarious moments. Before populist performance poetry, an earlier version of what was classifed as "Spoken Word" involved celebrities reciting (rather than singing) rock lyrics. Here's one of the gems of the genre by William Shatner. (Note: This is audio only.) I think you'll agree it offers the signs of the greatness that was to come in his career:
William Shatner on (Bob) Dylan
Elaine Equi on "Kansas City"
In the spirit of keeping the dialogue between rock and poetry going, here's Poet Elaine Equi's (my better half), take on the older Spoken Word tradition. When she performs this poem (from her upcoming book, Click and Clone), she reads it with all the solemnity of The Masters (who in this case are Mr. Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the immortal Sebastian Cabot):
Emerald City
after Wilbert Harrison
I'm going to Emerald City, Emerald City here I come
I'm going to Emerald City, Emerald City here I come
They got some crazy little wizards there
And I'm going to get me one.
Well I might take a plane
I might use a cane, but if I have to crawl
I'm gonna get there just the same
I'm going to Emerald City, Emerald City here I come
They got some crazy little wizards there
And I'm gonna get me one.
Might anyone out there like to share favorite (or wacky) poem/rock collaborations?
