Taylor Swift's new album under the magnifying glass of poets

Taylor Swift He released his eleventh album, Section of tortured poets. But how poetic is it? Can song lyrics be read as if they were poems separated from their source?

In this article, four experts assess whether Swift's latest album lives up to poetry.

Alison Adair“My personal opinion is that if someone writes poems and considers himself a poet, then he is a poet,” says the professor of poetry and other literary forms at Boston College. “And Swift has shown that she's taking it seriously. She's already stated (Pablo) Neruda In his book, he mentions (William) Wordsworth,quotes Emily Dickinson As one of his influences.”

He also said his students have told him that Swift's B-sides — not her radio hits — tend to be the most poetic, which is also true of poets. “His most famous poems are those that appeal most to people, are clearest, and, somehow, do not always contain the secret of poetry.”

the teacher Elizabeth Scala“There's something poetic about her writing,” says she, who teaches a course on Swift's songwriting at the University of Texas at Austin, adding that her work in… Section of tortured poets It refers to a time before printing technology when people sang poems. “In the early stages of English poetry, they were inseparable,” he says. “They're not an exact match, but they have a long, rich history together that was rekindled with Taylor Swift.”

He says: “It is appropriate to talk about every composer of songs as a poet.” Michael ChaserProfessor of Poetry and Popular Culture at Willamette University.

“There are a lot of things that musicians and songwriters and singers can do that poetry can't do,” Adair says, citing melisma, or the ability to sustain a single syllable over many notes, as an example. Or the nature of the song, with its uplifting production and melancholy lyricism, which can create a confusing and rich tapestry. “This is something music can do in a profound way, and poetry has to do in different ways.”

“She can say her works are poetry,” Scala adds. “But I also think music is very important: it is a kind of additional poetry.”

The current Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Lemon? “Poetry and lyrics are not exactly the same (we poets must make all our music with words and breath only),” he wrote. “But for an icon like Taylor, bringing more attention to poetry as a genre is exciting.”

Scala considers Swift's influences on… Section of tortured poets Includes Sylvia Platha confessional poet who had previously been inspired by songs such as crazy woman And Bear it.

fifteen days (fifteen days) uses collected verses (there is no period, no punctuation at the end of each line) and Scala points out the dissonance between the smoothness of the music and its words, as in the line “My mornings are Mondays stuck in the endless month of February.” '. “It kind of encapsulates the boredom of the ordinary and then unleashes a kind of tension and anger toward the ordinary in those verses,” he says. In the verses, Swift says, “He exploits the house,” and this combats “literary” music.

Swift's lyrics also allow for multi-dimensional readings: “I touched you” can refer to the physical and infidelity in the song, Scala says, or it can refer to the emotional, as in “I touched you.”

Swift has always played with unexpected rhyme and rhythm. “This often sets a pattern and is unsatisfying, and this usually occurs at a time of emotional pain,” Adair says.

in fifteen daysIt appears in different ways. Adair points out that the chorus is more out of sync than the rest of the song, meaning Swift is using multiple syllables for the same beat. “This gives it a quick touch,” he says.

“By rhyming the words 'alcoholic' and 'aesthetic', he plays a lot with assonance. 'Technically, it's a repetition of sounds,' he adds. There's also tension in the title fifteen days, an archaic term used for a song with contemporary instrumentation. “There's a hint of betrayal, and some of the stuff is very romantic, but a lot of it is superficial and unapologetic. There's something poetic about it.

“From the perspective of tapping into some poetic resources, these types of trucks become familiar metaphors for one’s emotional state,” Chassard says. fifteen days.

He says the speaker is “stuck in the past and in the future that could have been,” using a dystopian image of American suburbia as a metaphor and “cultivating the feeling of numbness, which we hear in the tone of the words.”

“But the speaker is so immersed in his own emotional state that he can't think of other associations with political words like 'treason' and 'Florida' and 'lost in America' that many of us can think of,” he says.

Title fifteen days“It's quite poetic,” he adds. It is also a period of 14 days, or two weeks. “For most of us, ‘lost in America’ means a paycheck.”

“It references Greek mythology,” Scala says. Cassandra, part of a surprising collection of songs featuring Swift's debut. The title refers to the daughter of the King of Troy who predicted the destruction of the city but was cursed so that no one would believe her.

“She is the one who tells the truth. No one wants to believe, and no one can believe.” Swift “thinks in terms of literary models about telling the truth.”

Adair notices So long, London: From the jingle of high school harmonies that opens into a flat first verse, “quiet and domestic,” he says.

“This mismatch is very poetic, because it's bringing together two things from two different tonal registers, basically, and saying that they both have value, that they belong together: the high, traditional high type and the everyday, informal type.” And that's something the Beat poets did as well, where They redefined the relationship between the sacred and the profane.”

Source: AFP