This be the verse.
Don't ask the latest wave of singer-songwriters which albums they've been listening to - they're more inspired by books than music. Laura Barton talks to the new poets of pop
The Guardian
Poets' corner ... (clockwise from top left) James Yorkston, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Joanna Newsom, and Josh Ritter.
In 2005, sales of poetry in Britain drifted to 890,220 books - said to be the worst figure in some time. By contrast, we bought 45,772,541 novels. In the same year, a survey conducted by Book Marketing/TMS found that of the 63% of Britons aged between 12 and 74 who bought any kind of book, 34% purchased fiction, and just 1% chose poetry. The publishing industry was aghast and set about dreaming up harebrained schemes such as texting verse to mobile phones to bolster our poetic sensibilities. But is there really great cause for panic? Might it be that today we are finding our poetry elsewhere, away from the printed page?
Poetry and music have weathered a long and tortuous relationship. Until the 16th century they made happy bedfellows, and a poet and a composer was frequently the same thing - the majority of poetry was created to be sung or chanted. Thereafter the relationship largely fizzled out. It was rekindled, arguably, with the arrival of rock'n'roll.
"Rock'n'roll is characterised by driving and simple but not necessarily easy rhythms, and the words hover between the rhythms," says Christopher Ricks, Oxford University's professor of poetry, who has written about Bob Dylan's importance as a poet. "The question is, what do these wonderful simplicities of rhythm do to the words? Just because in the art of song, words are joined by music and melody, that doesn't mean they are less important. It's a bit like saying oxygen isn't as important in water because it's a compound."
But is it possible to describe a songwriter as "poetical"? After all, like "literary", it's an ambiguous term. "One way to address the dilemma of resolving what is and what is not poetry is to subscribe to what [Leonard] Cohen says: poetry is a verdict rather than an intention," observes David Boucher, author of Dylan & Cohen, Poets of Rock and Roll. But even that is fraught with subjectivity. "To call something poetic, or artistic, is deliberately to invoke this positive sense of approval," Boucher says. "The positive is not of course universal, and for some, poetry and the label poetry may be tainted by unpleasant associations with school and the 'high' culture of the establishment."
Indeed, poetry - in the book sense - has a bad reputation among even the most literary songwriters. "I see a huge gulf between poetry and song lyrics," insists Bill Callahan. "Poetry is so often an internal and individual thing. Music is a social art that speaks to the body more than the mind. Even if you choose to listen to music alone, you are still a part of a living thing. Poetry is about separating yourself out from the masses. It's about not being a social animal. I dislike poetry!"
Poetry can certainly be off-putting. To the uninitiated, it can appear as intimidating as stepping onto a dancefloor without the requisite moves; the difference is that to many, observing the onomatopoeia seems a whole lot less enticing than doing the mashed potato or learning how to pony like Bony Maroney.
"The greatest disservice that a poem can do is to act as a wall between the writer and the reader, or the performer and the audience," says Josh Ritter. "That is what I believe is happening to poetry these days. Somehow, poetry has been turned into a lock-box which we can only write or read after we've gone to graduate school. People seem worried that poetry isn't selling. If you have nothing useful to sell, people aren't gonna buy it. Poetry is supposed to be useful. It's supposed to help us with our lives. Writing is supposed to be generous."
Callahan's lyrics are characterised by their strong narratives, from the tale of a river guard watching over prisoners swimming, to the youthful adventure of finding "skin mags in the brambles". It is not surprising, then, that Callahan finds motivation in other forms of literature. "Prose is a different story," he declares. "I read a lot of prose but I don't see any direct influence on my songs. I can read anything as long as it rings long and true. It's more inspiration than influence. If I get up in the morning and read for an hour, instead of watching TV, it tends to make me write stuff. It tightens your brain and makes you shoot out some words of your own."
While Callahan denies direct literary inspiration, other songwriters are more forthcoming: M Ward tells me of stealing lines of Emily Dickinson; Josh Ritter based much of his last album, The Animal Years, on the writings of Mark Twain; the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle wrote a whole collection of songs inspired by Don DeLillo's habit of comparing the sun to an "orange ball", and composed a group of songs featuring the same characters, inspired by the Dream Songs sequence of the poet John Berryman. Joanna Newsom readily admits to a little literary theft on her latest record: "I filched two characters that in my head had life to them, were so finely drawn that they became archetypal: Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury, running with his hands in his pockets, foreshadowing greed and repression - he became a touchstone; and similarly in the song Emily there's a reference to Lolita. Not directly to the character but to the heavy, languorous energy, that listlessness and decadence, the rangy long limbs of her adolescence. He's giving her candy and fancy dresses to fill the hole he's creating in her heart."
Naturally, the process of songwriting is different from writing poetry or prose. M Ward generally starts with the music. So does Newsom: "It starts with a melody," she says, "but I hate arbitrariness in lyrics. I've never chosen a word just because it sounds good. It's important that each line has musical value, which in my mind is similar to poetical value. There has to be correlation between instrument activity and word activity." Callahan goes in backwards: "I can't write the music first," he says. "I write a block of words that holds together, for me, without music. But I am also hearing the music in a ghostly way as I write the words."
For Ritter much of it is about wordplay: "I make up things off the top of my head," he says. "I like them best when they rhyme. I'm pretty unapologetic about that part. A rhyme grounds the thought being expressed in a bedrock. It gives the game rules by which to play. When you do a crossword, you have boxes of white and black to go by. Songs are the same way." Darnielle tends to go in both guns blazing: "The songs tend to be written with the guitar, hands going back and forth, scatting almost," he says. "Blurting out sounds to find where a melodic line is, finding out what the line length is. And then writing a line or two, but improvising words to see how they fit in. Maybe just a phrase." It is different, he says, to other forms of writing. "Poetry I sit down and write."
Many of these songwriters have aspirations to experiment in other genres of writing. Darnielle's other passion is writing poetry. The son of an English tutor, and a former literature student, he knows his stuff: "Gentlemen used to read poetry, women too, but it was a kind of a gentlemanly pursuit. My professor, Robert Mezey, is always insisting - and it seems like a romanticised past - that any educated person, set to it, would be able to give you four lines of pentameter as part of their education. Now, this is not the case." The reason, he suspects, is the rise in electronic media. "You base a lot more now on seeing and hearing than on reading," he says.
There is also a lot of bad poetry about these days, which he thinks is another factor. "The disappearance of objective criteria on which to judge poems sort of opens the floodgates for a lot of bad poetry," Darnielle explains, sitting cross-legged on the edge of his hotel bed and frowning a little. "And when a market becomes flooded with stuff that's poor, then the customers go away. And bad poetry - there can't ever have been so much as there is present today." It's Walt Whitman's fault, he says. "I would blame my own country, especially uncle Walt, for this. Uncle Walt is the supreme egotist. Everything exists in his world with respect to his own gaze and presence. By his relation to it." He draws his mouth into a line of thin resignation. "Because it's a complex issue to discuss, beyond most of us including me, people just throw up their hands and go, 'Well, I don't understand it but it must be good!'"
Still, he believes human beings have an inherent need for poetry. He quotes William Carlos Williams' poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: "It is difficult to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." He shrugs. "I think that's why rap is popular. There's not a rock writer as good as Ghostface [Killah]. He's just shocking. And David LaDude. Oh boy." And even so, Darnielle believes, rap is past its lyrical peak.
Darnielle still writes poetry. "I like bizarre images, collages. I really like the sounds of words," he says with relish. Would he hinge a whole poem or song around one particular word? "Oh yeah, I'll bite down on one," he grins broadly and displays a fine set of teeth. "If there's a word I want to play up. People have words they say well." And what are his? "It's been observed that I say window, hair and water a lot. Fire is a nice one always. Monkey is an outstanding word but you have to go light on it. You can run it into the ground."
Newsom, meanwhile, who dropped out of college where she was studying poetry-reading and short-story writing to pursue music, sees her new album as at least a sidestep towards prose. "They're long songs, and in a lot of ways I was thinking of them as short stories," she says.
Ritter plans to write novels alongside his music, and Callahan too has his eye on writing prose: "I'm working on an epistolary novelette," he says soberly. Already, however, he is finding the new creative form something of a challenge: "It is more difficult than songwriting. The horizon is so wide and it's so quiet - there is no music!"
Post-War by M Ward and Get Lonely by the Mountain Goats are out now on 4AD. Ys by Joanna Newsom is released on November 6 on Drag City. Josh Ritter plays Whitehaven Civic Hall on November 16, then tours.
03.10.2006: Pete Doherty on the poets who inspired him
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