Column: As ‘Tortured Poets Department’ arrives, we wondered: Can Taylor Swift be poetry?

It goes back to debates about Dylan — actually much earlier. It has special roots in Chicago's own blend of slam poetry and songwriting. What's a song, and what's a poem, anyway?

The Tortured Poets Department does not exist, but if it did, there would be a lot of pillows for reclining. There would be a circular track for fretting. There would be skylights because, you know, vitamin D. There would be a liquor license. The door to every poet’s office — yes, office — would be soundproof, and the lighting would be smart and because the chair of the department would be Taylor Swift — large expense accounts.

When she first heard about this department, B. Metzger Sampson, executive director of the Chicago Poetry Center, rolled her eyes. That name alone, Tortured Poets Department, “it sort of brings to mind poetry as black berets and a lot of turtlenecks.”

Swift, she said, seemed to have the outdated image of poets as revolutionary brooders.

If Taylor Swift robs a bank in her Patty Hearst beret, I said, you’re going to feel dumb.

“If Taylor Swift robs a bank and redistributes income,” Sampson said, “I’ll accept that.”

Since February, when Swift announced that her next album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” would be arriving on April 19, I’ve wondered about the ins and outs of this department, and if Swift knew what she was doing, aligning herself with poets. We know she would be chairman because that’s how she signed her name to a letter announcing the record. But, I thought, would other songwriters be allowed into this department? Because, as long as there have been song lyrics, there’ve been debates:

Can lyrics ever be poetry?

Are pop lyrics literature?

By the force of Swift’s popularity alone, the album title revives this conversation. In fact, bringing the album up with poets and poetry academics, the first thing many did was parse every word in that title: “The,” for instance, suggests something official, singular, perhaps exclusionary. “Tortured” was a bit much (“Who is torturing Taylor Swift?”), and should be taken as satire or praised for accepting the intense feelings of a working artist, billionaire or not. “Poets” might sound pretentious from a pop star, but that’s also why it could be taken as a bold self-proclamation. And “Department,” well, that’s institutional — “white people get so obsessed with classification,” Sampson said.

What I did not hear was, she’s no poet.

“I am pretty ecumenical in my relationship to cultural production,” said Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, director of the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern University. “Some say there’s a distinction between lyrics and poetry. I’m not among them. Donne, Auden were set to music at times. Rap is an inheritor of Old English stress forms. Some lyrics, taken without music, might read like banalities — ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ even the Great American Songbook. A lot of people want to say poetry is the more rigorous form. They are more comfortable saying that a bad lyric is not poetry rather than, well… bad poetry. To me, everything about the distinction is not interesting enough to justify it.”

Not a single poet and musician (and musician-poet) contacted for this story said that lyrics were not literature, or that lyrics could never act as poetry, but rather, we could learn a lot about poetry and pop lyrics by recognizing both similarities and differences. There’s no easy definition. Lyrics require music to reach their truest form — unless they don’t. Poems require a certain musicality before they seem finished — unless they don’t.

Why, some asked, nodding to Tay, do we have to go and make things so complicated?

Adrian Matejka, editor of Chicago-based Poetry magazine, used to teach a course titled “The Poetics of Rap Music” at Indiana University. He said “all rappers are poets but not particularly good poets, and yet because of rap, we also have millions of people listening to poetry right now.” He said he would like Taylor Swift “to do for poetry what she did for Travis Kelce.” But then he thinks of a bar he used to live near, named Poets Bar. He was flattered until he learned that “Poets” part stood for (Expletive) On Everything, Tomorrow is Saturday.

“And you know what? The poet in me will take whatever we’re offered.”

Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer-winning poet and former New Yorker poetry editor, noted that eight years ago, the last time this conversation got hot, after Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize, “people seemed confused. They insisted Dylan was not a poet, and yet Dylan won for literature, not poetry. And yet, if you open any anthology of English poetry, and read chronologically, you are going to wade through acres of song lyrics before you even arrive at the poetry we know. Because poetry came out of an oral tradition.” After Dylan won, the novelist Jodi Picoult tweeted: “I’m happy for Bob Dylan, #doesthatmeanIcanwinagrammy?” Never mind that she can (for best spoken word poetry album), our insistence on siloing creative people reveals a dreary lack of imagination.

Muldoon, who is as serious about writing songs as about writing poems, said: “Sometimes one doesn’t know what one has when you start writing. I’m writing a song at this moment called ‘I Got Hurt in Jersey.’ Which is just something I see on billboards here, law firms advertising about compensation settlements. That line jumped out at me as a song, but I could have just as easily started a poem with those same words, right?”

Chicago’s first poet laureate, avery r. young, carries as much credibility as a stage musician as he does as a poet. “There is as much freedom to be lyrical, or literal, in a lyric as there is in a poem,” he said. “‘Tom’s Diner’ (by Suzanne Vega) is as much a poem as a Shakespearean sonnet. And ‘Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud’ (by James Brown) is as profound a couplet as anything from Langston Hughes. But a lot of people don’t understand the musicality of poems, so poetry gets associated with academia and song lyrics are considered pop culture, and that has everything to do with making money. (Poet) Terrance Hayes could be on a music chart alongside Usher, but there’s a reason Terrance Hayes doesn’t perform during half-time at the Super Bowl.”

If you want to raise the blood pressure of a poet, tell them to stay in their lane.

And yet, critics, audiences, they seem to revel in this.

There’s a long, caustic mirror history of pop stars as poets. John Lennon, at the peak of Beatlemania, released two poetry collections that were politely reviewed. Ever since, for every mild shrug given to collections by Alicia Keys and Lana Del Rey, there’s Jewel, whose sniffily received 1998 poetry book, “A Night Without Armor,” sold more than 2 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling collections of poetry in the United States, ever. Or Entertainment Weekly deciding “Blinking With Fists,” Billy Corgan’s best-selling 2004 poetry book, was “pretentious and confoundingly esoteric.” But then, even the New York Times, in a review of Dylan’s 1971 poetry collection “Tarantula,” decided its publication was “not a literary event because Dylan is not a literary figure.”

That didn’t age well.

The conversation, though, traces its roots to the old hoary argument about high and low culture — which, like many things, begins with the Greeks. “Lyric poetry in the Western tradition was called lyric poetry because at one point it was performed with a lyre,” explained poet Charif Shanahan, who teaches at Northwestern and just received the prestigious Whiting Award for emerging writers. What makes poetry distinctive from lyrics, he argued, is the visual look of a poem on a page, and how its structure can be made to convey a poem’s meaning. But such distinctions were already muddier by the Middle Ages, when troubadours pioneered a mix of lyric poetry, storytelling and music.

By the time Bob Dylan arrives in the 1960s — along with contemporaries and acolytes such as Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed and Patti Smith — it’s harder for an average person without a poetry background to recognize a difference between a lyric sheet and a poem. About this same time, musician-poets such as Gil Scott-Heron (a major influence on avery r. young) and the Last Poets are intentionally blurring the distinction; it’s no surprise both would later become key sources for hip hop. Even now, Smith, who grew up in Logan Square, will pause during her concerts to read her poetry.

Today, it’s not unusual for an organization such as the Chicago Poetry Center to train the poets it sends into Chicago classrooms on how to use contemporary pop music as a tool for explaining poetry — its rhythms, its pauses and subjects that are written about. Chicago poet Phillip B. Williams (who received a Whiting in 2017) said: “It can be easier to get a meaning of a word from a song. I learned the word ‘blatant’ from Mariah Carey!”

Then he sang: “Oh, I can’t be elusive with you, ‘cause it’s blatant that I’m feeling you …”

“Mariah sings as a complete statement,” he said, “but in a poem, you might not know what’s said until you reach the next line. Then somebody like (musician) Esperanza Spalding drags lines at times. So, it can be less about the words than the execution.”

When I called the celebrated Michigan-born poet Victoria Chang, she was reading some new work and listening closely for the “musicality” in the lines. “When my writing feels flat, I know to pay closer attention to musicality in a poem,” she said. Meaning, bounce, flow, sound. “I’ve been reading a lot of Sylvia Plath, who is incredibly musical. Lyrics are written for music and the writer is also thinking of bringing in music, but read Plath on a page, which she wrote to live on a page, and they don’t need music because they are music. You want to hear something sonically beautiful? The first line of ‘Lady Lazarus’”:

I have done it again.

It’s not such a leap from there to, as Taylor Swift sang:

Look what you made me do.

Adam Bradley, who teaches English and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and specializes in the poetics of lyrics, argues even the ad-libbed ah’s and uh huh’s of contemporary rap somewhat reflect the dance that poets occasionally perform between musicality and making sense. But on the subject of Taylor Swift, he sees a sophisticated writer who sees herself flatly as a poet, though with humor. “She talks without irony on ‘Holy Ground’: Back when you fit my poems like a perfect rhyme. But evokes cliches — which can get used to critique her — in a way that make a cliche resonate, adding something new.”

Think of ‘Invisible String’ on ‘Folklore’:

Cold was the steel of my axe to grind

For the boys who broke my heart

Now I send their babies presents.

That’s terrific, witty writing. And it’s not even among the many songs on the syllabus for Taylor Swift and Her World, a new class at Harvard University, being taught for the first time this spring by poet Stephanie Burt. She discusses Swift as a songwriter, she said. Though context is king. Swift is taught in the class alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge; “Red (Taylor’s Version)” is taught the same day as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59:

If there be nothing new, but that which is

Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled

Which, laboring for invention, bear amiss

The second burden of a former child.

Or as Taylor sang:

Lord, what will become of me

Once I’ve lost my novelty?

Burt is not equating Shakespeare and Swift but showing, reaching across centuries, how both are noticing the expiration date on their youth. Indeed, Muldoon said, while certain singers write lyrics that can “stand up” on a page without any music attached — Dylan, Smith, Joni Mitchell — that’s often coincidental to their intentions. As close as lyrics and poems appear, translation is rarely tidy. While it’s mistakenly assumed Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” was written to be read live — it plays now like a Patti Smith outtake — Brooklyn musician David Nagler found Carl Sandburg’s less sprightly “Chicago Poems” open to accompaniment. He recorded a 2016 album of Sandburg, with inspiration from Randy Newman and Harry Smith’s “Anthology of Folk Music”; he had help from Chicago musicians, including Sally Timms, Kelly Hogan, Jeff Tweedy, Jon Langford.

But even that took 18 years to get right.

Charles Kim has taught songwriting at the Old Town School of Folk Music for almost 25 years. “Some people don’t want to pay attention to syllabic stress or melody or consider the way music and language have their own priorities,” he told me. “So one thing I tell students who start out writing songs is a song is not a composition stapled to a poem.” He suggests listening to “Here Comes the Sun,” and noticing how banal the lyrics are (“less than a greeting card”) yet paired to music, it’s poetry, with an emotional release.

Happily, there’s middle ground, a place where poetry and music coexist.

Called Chicago.

Specifically, a scene that’s existed for decades, composed mostly of Black musicians and poets, performing on the same stages, pulling inspiration from the musicality of poets before them, such as Gwendolyn Brooks. The national slam poetry movement — a performative form — was born here. Between two local arts organizations alone, Louder Than a Bomb (now, the Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival) and Young Chicago Authors, we’ve witnessed a who-who of songwriter-musician-poet-writers unusually fluid in navigating mediums — Jamila Woods, Kara Jackson, Eve L. Ewing, Nate Marshall, Noname. Jackson, a former U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate, wrote a lyric that goes:

He said, ‘You’re just no fun, you’re just no fun’

And if seeing you naked wasn’t such a bargain

it would be a home run, it would be a home run.

That’s a song. But it could be a poem. It could stand up on the page. When avery r. young — long a part of this scene — writes a song lyric, he considers accessibility and melody, and with a poem he thinks of syntax and words on the page. Lately, he also thinks of Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” album, blurring boundaries, “interrogating who gets included in a genre.” And he thinks of Taylor Swift, “being tongue in cheek about being a tortured poet, but then, also maybe just being honest about where she goes when she writes? She’s saying it’s cool just to write — to emote! I mean, I tell everybody who asks that I am an interdisciplinary artist, and really, in the end, it’s all poetry.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com