Taylor Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ is here – but is the album actually poetic?
Taylor Swift has released her 11th studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department.”
But just how poetic is it? Is it even possible to close read lyrics like poems, divorced from their source material?
The Associated Press spoke to four experts to assess how Swift’s latest album stacks up to poetry.
IS TAYLOR SWIFT A POET?
Allison Adair, a professor who teaches poetry and other literary forms at Boston College, says yes.
“My personal opinion is that if someone writes poems and considers themself a poet, then they’re a poet,” she says. “And Swift has demonstrated that she takes it pretty seriously. She’s mentioned (Pablo) Neruda in her work before, she has an allusion to (William) Wordsworth, she cites Emily Dickinson as one of her influences.”
She also said her students told her Swift’s B-sides -- not her radio singles -tend to be her most poetic, which is true of poets, too. “Their most well-known poems are the ones that people lock into the most, that are the clearest, and in a way, don’t always have the mystery of poetry.”
Professor Elizabeth Scala, who teaches a course on Swift’s songbook at the University of Texas at Austin, says “there is something poetical about the way she writes,” adding that her work on “The Tortured Poets Department” references a time before print technology when people sang poems. “In the earliest stages of English poetry, they were inseparable,” she says. “Not absolutely identical, but they have a long and rich history together that is re-energized by Taylor Swift.”
“It’s proper to talk about every songwriter as a poet,” says Michael Chasar, a poetry and popular culture professor at Willamette University. “There are many things musicians and singer-songwriters can do that poetry cannot,” Adair says, citing melisma, or the ability to hold out 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 music can do viscerally and poetry has to do in different ways.”
“She might say her works are poetry,” adds Scala. “But I also think the music is so important -- kind of poetry-plus.”
As for current U.S. poet laureate Ada Limon? “Poetry and song lyrics aren’t exactly the same (we poets have to make all our music with only words and breath),” she wrote to the AP. “But having an icon like Taylor bring more attention to poetry as a genre is exciting.”
HOW SWIFT USES POETRY ON
THE SONG “FORTNIGHT”
Scala sees Swift’s influences on “The Tortured Poets Department” as including Sylvia Plath, a confessional poet she previously drew inspiration from on songs like “Mad Woman” and “Tolerate It.”
“Fortnight” uses enjambed lines (there’s no end stop, or punctuation at the end of each line) and Scala points out the dissonance between the music’s smoothness and its lyrics, like in the line “My mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.” “It kind of encapsulates boredom with the ordinary and then she unleashes a kind of tension and anger in the ordinary in those verses,” she says. In the verses, she says Swift “explodes the domestic,” and that fights up against the music, which is “literary.”
Swift’s lyrics, too, allow for multi-dimensional readings: “I touched you” could be physicality and infidelity in the song, Scala says, or it could mean it emotionally -as in, I moved you.
Swift has long played with rhyme and unexpected rhythm. “She’ll often establish a pattern and won’t satisfy it -- and that often comes in a moment of emotional ache,” says Adair.
On “Fortnight,” it appears in a few ways. Adair points out that the chorus is more syncopated than the rest of the song -which means Swift uses many more syllables for the same beat. “It gives this rushed quality,” she says.
“Rhyming ‘alcoholic’ and ‘aesthetic,’ she plays a lot with assonance. It is technically a vowel-driven repetition of sounds,” she adds. There’s a tension, too, in the title “Fortnight,” an archaic term used for a song with contemporary devices. “There’s an allusion to treason, and some of the stuff is hyper romantic, but a lot of it is very much a kind of unapologetic, plain speech. And there’s something poetic about that.”
“From the perspective of harnessing particular poetic devices, this kind of trucks in familiar metaphors for one’s emotional state,” Chasar says of “Fortnight.”
He says the speaker is “arrested in the past and a future that could’ve been,” using a dystopic image of American suburbs 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 their emotional state that they can’t think of any other associations with politically charged lyrics like ‘treason’ and ‘Florida’ and ‘lost in America’ that many of us would,” he says.
The title “Fortnight,” he adds, “is totally poetic. It’s also a period of 14 days, or two weeks. For most of us ‘lost in America,’ it means a paycheck.”
WHAT ARE SOME OTHER POETIC
MOMENTS ON THE ALBUM? “She’s making references to Greek mythology,” say Scala, like in “Cassandra,” which is part of a surprise set of songs Swift dropped Friday.
The title references the daughter of king of Troy, who foretold the city’s destruction but had been cursed so that no one believed her.
“She’s the truth teller. No one wants to believe, and no one can believe,” she says.
Swift is “thinking in terms of literary paradigms about truth telling.”
Adair looks to “So Long, London”: from the chiming, high school harmonies that open it to a plain first verse, “quiet and domestic,” she says.
“That mismatch is very poetic, because it’s pairing things from two different tonal registers, essentially, and saying they both have value, and they belong together: The kind of high mindedness and the high tradition and the kind of casual every day. That’s something the Beat poets did too, re-redefining the relationship between the sacred and profane.”
If you always thought your garden-variety heist movies could do with a bit more blood-sucking vampire, have we got a flick for you.
“Abigail,” featuring a 12-year-old tutu-wearing member of the undead, is way better than it should be, a gleeful genre-smashing romp through puddles of gore.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and producer Chad Villella -- part of Radio Silence Productions -- have cracked the modern horror code with such hits as “Ready or Not,” “Scream” and “Scream VI.” They do not disappoint with “Abigail,” even perhaps opening a new, bloody revenue stream. (And wait for the phone call scene, a nod to “Scream.”)
“Abigail” starts with an odd assortment of mercenaries -- played by “Scream” veteran Melissa Barrera, “Downton Abbey” star Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, William Catlett and the late Angus Cloud.
The six – representing the muscle, sniper, computer expert, getaway driver, medic etc – are hired to kidnap a rich preteen (nicknamed “Tiny Dancer”) and hold her for ransom. The rules are: No names. No backstory. No grabass, which is a weird request, if we’re being honest. All this group needs to do is detain the target for 24 hours until rich dad pays $50 million in ransom.
Why are six professional underworld characters needed to snatch and detain a sweet preteen, still wearing her tutu? That’s easy: Not all of them are going to survive to claim their share of $7 million. That’s because Abigail (Alisha Weir, awesome, stay away from me, no seriously) is really into, well, neckwork.
“I’m sorry about what’s going to happen to you,” Abigail sweetly tells the kidnappers. We have some idea – and it’s going to be great. Suddenly, the rambling estate they’re holding her becomes a prison. The tables are turned.
The script written by Stephen Shields (“The Hole in the Ground”) and regular Radio Silence collaborator Guy Busick (“Ready or Not” and the “Scream” movies) -- gleefully mines humor in the horror. Laughing a moment after a body fully explodes is normal here.
“This whole thing is a trip,” says one of the gang. Believe them. “Something doesn’t add up,” says another. Believe that guy, too.
Garlic, sunlight, spears and crucifixes are employed to try to stop Abigail,
who has hijacked the heist movie and turned it into a run-for-your-life thriller. She’s a very smart 12-year-old who turns hardened mercenaries against each other.
Barrera, who had been so central to the life of the “Scream” franchise, shows why she’s so good at horror -- funny, sarcastic, vulnerable, athletic, soulful and very convincing with a stake in her hand.
Stevens, who famously left the aristocratic “Downton Abbey” for better roles, may wonder what he’s doing here now, bathed in blood fighting a preteen vampire, but does an admirable job, definitely in on the camp.
But it’s Weir in the titular role who carries it, doing pirouettes and leaps as she chases the bad-guys-nowgood guys to the theme of “Swan Lake” with blood dripping down her throat, rotten teeth and feathers in her hair.
“I like to play with my food,” she says.
Run faster! “Abigail,” a Universal Pictures release that hits theaters Friday, is rated R for “strong bloody violence and gore throughout, pervasive language and brief drug use.”
Running time: 110 minutes.
Three stars out of four.
A $12 billion passenger bullet train linking Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area was dubbed the first true high-speed rail line in the nation on Monday, with the private company building it predicting millions of ticket-buyers will be boarding trains by 2028.
“People have been dreaming of high-speed rail in America for decades,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg before taking a stage with union representatives and company officials at the future site of a terminal to be built just south of the Las Vegas Strip. “It’s really happening this time.”
Buttigieg cited Biden administration support for the project that he said will bring thousands of union jobs, boost local economies and cut traffic and air pollution.
Brightline West, whose sister company already operates a fast train between Miami and Orlando in Florida, aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track almost all in the median of Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California. It would link there with a commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles. A station also is planned in San Bernardino County’s Victorville area.
Company officials say the goal is to have trains exceeding speeds of 186 mph (300 kph) -- comparable to Japan’s Shinkansen bullet trains – operating in time for the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
“I believe we’ll look back at today and say, ‘This was the birth of an industry of high-speed rail,”’ Brightline Holdings founder Wes Edens said Monday.
The company aims to link U.S. cities that are too near each other for air travel to make sense and too far for people to drive.
Las Vegas has no Amtrak service. The idea of a bullet train to Los Angeles dates back decades under various names including DesertXpress. Brightline West acquired the project in 2019, and company and public officials say it has all required right-of-way and environmental approvals, along with labor agreements.
Brightline received Biden administration backing including a $3 billion grant from federal infrastructure funds and recent approval to sell another $2.5 billion in tax-exempt bonds.
The company won federal authorization in 2020 to sell $1 billion in similar bonds.
Brightline West says electric-powered trains will cut the four-hour trip across the Mojave Desert to a little more than two hours. It projects 11 million oneway passengers per year, with fares that Edens said will be comparable to airline ticket costs. The trains will offer rest rooms, WiFi, food and beverage sales and the option to check luggage.
Officials hope the train line will relieve congestion on I-15, where drivers often sit in miles of crawling traffic while returning home to Southern California from a Las Vegas weekend. An average of more than 44,000 automobiles per day crossed the California-Nevada state line on I-15 in 2023, according to Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority data.
Florida-based Brightline Holdings’ Miami-line debuted in 2018 and expanded service to Orlando International Airport last September with trains reaching speeds up to 125 mph (200 kph). It offers 16 round-trips per day with one-way tickets for the 235-mile (378-kilometer) distance costing about $80.
Other fast trains in the U.S. include Amtrak’s Acela, which can top 150 mph (241 kph) between Boston and Washington, D.C. But fast train connections for other U.S. cities have been floated, including Dallas to Houston; Atlanta to Charlotte, North Carolina; Chicago to St. Louis; and Seattle to Portland, Oregon. Most have faced delays.
In California, a proposed 500-mile (805-kilometer) rail line linking Los Angeles and San Francisco was approved by voters in 2008, but has been beset by rising costs and routing disputes.
A 2022 business plan by the California High-Speed Rail Authority projected the cost had more than tripled to $105 billion.