Poetry and Pop


Page 13



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As I've said, both Sweet Nothings and Aloud will help readers
better understand the impact popular music has had on contemporary poetry. For
better and for worse. But let's return for a moment to Simon Frith's question:
can literature inhabit the same territory as pop music? The answer, I suppose,
will depend in part on whether anthologies like these can help us map out that
territory -- a space that includes not only poetry's responses to pop music, but
pop music's responses to poetry.
 That is, we need to remember and account for (to
give just a few examples) the fact that both the psychedelic musings  
 of Jim Morrison and the
punk-lyric innovations of Patti Smith were influenced, as Carrie Noland reminds us, by Rimbaud; that Lou Reed (pictured on this page)
studied with the poet Delmore Schwartz, and that Leonard Cohen was
writing poetry before he was writing song lyrics.
 To map out common territory or
equivalences, we'll need more examples of the ways in which poetry and pop music
produce and reproduce each other. And we'll need to think more about the ways in
which this process complicates not only literary and musical genres and
histories, but musical and literary experiences. 









-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
 Thomas Swiss is co-editor 
    of Mapping the Beat: Pop Music and Contemporary Theory (Blackwell.) His other 
    books include Measure (Alabama) and Rough Cut, a collection of poems (Illinois). 
    

    




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 Thomas Swiss//Drake University//515 271 2265





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