What makes song lyrics poetry?

The Poetry of Pop delves into debate

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature last October, it produced a bonanza of debate over questions that had long dominated late-night dorm room and bar stool conversations. Is pop music poetry? Are pop songs poems? For some of us, the controversy hearkened back to what was once a staple of the American classroom, the with-it prof who proved his subversive bona fides by treating rock lyrics — Mr. Tambourine Man was a favourite subject, if my memories of my undergraduate days are correct — as legitimate objects of critical analysis. The result was usually just embarrassing, for everyone concerned.

Adam Bradley is not that guy, not least because he dismissed the whole Nobel contretemps as “bombastic polemics.” An English professor at the University of Colorado and the founding director of the Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture, Bradley is a newer breed of pop intellectual who combines erudite analysis and street-level cool in an invigorating new book called 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. 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.”

Bradley is what some people would call a “popist,” that is, a critic who sees esthetic 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 judgments. He is, in addition, an unabashed formalist — he studied under the great modernist critic Helen Vendler — who relies on traditional techniques of close reading. The intersection of these possibly perpendicular critical tendencies generates unusual dynamics in Bradley’s thinking, and their point of confluence is a source of both rigour and diffusion. As a popist, Bradley has an inclusive and catholic vision: He finds merit in all kinds of genres, and his invitation to the reader to participate in the critical project is warm and authentic.

When the news of Dylan’s Nobel broke, there were many who pre-emptively proclaimed themselves tired of the debate, which to them was both a manufactured controversy and essentially immaterial. I disagree; people have been thinking about song and lyric and poem since Plato, trying to understand what they mean, how they work; doing so is an essential process in making sense of our emotional lives. Bradley understands this, and his book at bottom is a celebration of the mysterious process by which “the dance of word and music makes songs act on our imagination and emotions just as the best poems do.” Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in literature last year rekindled the debate over pop music and poetry.