{"id":3547,"date":"2017-05-05T16:08:42","date_gmt":"2017-05-05T23:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3547"},"modified":"2017-05-05T16:08:42","modified_gmt":"2017-05-05T23:08:42","slug":"songwritings-roots-in-poetry-and-prose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2017\/05\/songwritings-roots-in-poetry-and-prose.html","title":{"rendered":"Songwriting’s Roots in Poetry and Prose"},"content":{"rendered":"

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GENERALLY, I’m skeptical of the glib and automatic denoting of any intelligent or articulate musician as “a poet.” But the connection between popular song and literature go back, in the Anglo-American tradition, at least as long as The Beatles’ interest in Lewis Carroll and Dylan’s borrowing from Scottish Border ballads.<\/p>\n

Of course, at the beginning of the Western tradition, the connection is even stronger: Greek lyric poetry was known that way because of its accompaniment by the lyre.<\/p>\n

In any case, with Dylan’s Nobel it seemed the right time to launch a series I’ve been thinking about for a long time. My editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, a young(ish) native of the Soviet-era Ukraine who loves Russian poetry as well as California freak folk, felt the same way, and offered me a monthly berth. He took the title from a lyric by a late, great literary songwriter named Lou Reed: “All the Poets.”<\/p>\n

The initial column launched a few weeks ago with my interview (here<\/a>) with Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, the grumpy, inspired singer-songwriter whose work I have followed since the mid-90s. Merritt, always intelligent but sometimes a difficult interview, was quite inspired here I think. (The first of the band’s two nights at UCLA Royce Hall, behind the new LP 50 Song Memoir, was hilarious and moving.)<\/p>\n

Please keep your eyes out for more of these: Another, with a songwriter from Britain, is in the works for late May.<\/p>\n

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[contextly_auto_sidebar] GENERALLY, I’m skeptical of the glib and automatic denoting of any intelligent or articulate musician as “a poet.” But the connection between popular song and literature go back, in the Anglo-American tradition, at least as long as The Beatles’ interest in Lewis Carroll and Dylan’s borrowing from Scottish Border ballads. Of course, at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,40,34,30,29],"tags":[724,789,790,714],"class_list":{"0":"post-3547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books","7":"category-indie","8":"category-literary","9":"category-los-angeles","10":"category-west-coast","11":"tag-folk-music","12":"tag-literature","13":"tag-magnetic-fields","14":"tag-music","15":"entry","16":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3549,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3547\/revisions\/3549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}