Yesterday, The Kenyon Review wrote a beautifully prosaic blog post about famous persons who have written poetry. Among them are Bob Dylan, Leonard Nimoy, Jewel, Alicia Keys, Ashanti, Joni Mitchell, and even he-man Jack Palance. Who says poetry isn’t manly?
I was particularly struck that Mr. Spock was so prolific in his versifying. It just goes to show that pointed-eared geeks can enter the elite world of the literati as much as anyone. But one name that the great literary journal KR failed to mention was Ally Sheedy, of The Breakfast Club
KR ended its blog post with these words:
Maybe this post should be a lesson to MFA programs looking to help graduates publish? Teach them to sing. Teach them to look good in front of the camera. It helps.
Beautiful. But is it true? Judging from the lines KR chose to reprint from Nimoy’s published work, I’d say it doesn’t help much. I won’t reprint it here, but you can read it for yourself at the KR blog. Suffice it to say that Nimoy really didn’t say anything new. Besides being convinced that if all mankind could lock arms and sing “Kumba ya, My Lord,” the most beloved half-Vulcan in the universe didn’t really impress me much with his verse. He could have been channeling John Lennon for the poem seems to be a replay of the latter’s “Imagine,” which is much better poetry than that penned by Nimoy.
Of course, I don’t mean to malign a man who has many fans. He is a wonderful actor and who can deny that his three years as Mr. Spock are not a moment in history that deserves much praise? Mr. Spock has other talents as well (his photography is incredible). But as a poet, he leaves much to be desired, which brings me to my point …
One cannot rise to poetic fame on the coattails of success in other fields, and I doubt that is what The Kenyon Review intended to convey with their recent blog post. Being a successful painter, or actor, or photographer, or dancer, or former president even (can you say Jimmy Carter?) doesn’t mean that one can go on to success as a poet. But it doesn’t mean one can’t either. Success as a poet, like anything else, requires commitment and dedication. One must be driven by a love of craft. And without that commitment, without that drive, without the passion that impels achievement, all the credits in the world won’t make one a poet. If you truly want to be a poet, you’ve got to, as in the word of Professor John Keating, make your life extraordinary.
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My sense is that whenever lyricists write lyrics, they are always writing poetry. That says nothing about whether or not they are writing good or bad or indifferent poetry. But I try to avoid making “poetry” an evaluative term (in contrast to those who think, with varying degrees of sophistication, that if it’s not good it’s not poetry). I try to make it a descriptive term: stuff written in lines, not paragraphs, and often written with some tools from the traditional repertoire of what, for lack of a better word, one might call “verse.” (The one major gap in this idea of poetry is that it does not cover “the prose poem,” but that’s a topic for another day.)
I agree, Andrew. Yes, songwriters are writing poetry when the pen their lyrics, but the element of music also makes the poetry something else. A bad poem can be redeemed with the right music. I have heard terrible lyrics to a catchy tune and forgive the lyricist on the basis on the music alone. Take away the music and all you have is a bad poem. And you are right again when you say that even bad poetry is poetry. Definitions are subjective as are evaluations based on merit. I guess what makes great poetry so great is not how much value is placed on it by those who admire it today, but by the aggregate of admiration it can achieve over time.