The Poetics of American Song Lyrics

Poets, teachers, and musicologists fusing studies of form, scansion, and musical creation to redefine the place of the american bard

Contributions from Lamar Alexander, Gordon Ball, Adam Bradley, David Caplan, Wyn Cooper, David Daniel, Stephen M. Duesner, Claudia Emerson, Beth Ann Fennelly, Keith Flynn, Jesse Graves, Peter Guralnick, John Paul Hampstead, Brian Howe, Jill Jones, David Kirby, Robert McParland, Pat Pattison, Charlotte Pence, Eric Reimer, Jeffrey Roessner, Tony Tost, Ben Yagoda, and Kevin Young

The Poetics of American Song Lyrics is the first collection of academic essays that regards songs as literature and that identifies intersections between the literary histories of poems and songs. The essays by well-known poets and scholars including Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson, Peter Guralnick, Adam Bradley, David Kirby, Kevin Young, and many others, locate points of synthesis and separation so as to better understand both genres and their crafts. The essayists share a desire to write on lyrics in a way that moves beyond sociological, historical, and autobiographical approaches and explicates songs in relation to poetics. Unique to this volume, the essays focus not on a single genre but on folk, rap, hip hop, country, rock, indie, soul, and blues.

The first section of the book provides a variety of perspectives on the poetic history and techniques within songs and poems, and the second section focuses on a few prominent American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Stipe. Through conversational yet in-depth analyses of songs, the essays discuss sonnet forms, dramatic monologues, Modernism, ballads, blues poems, confessionalism, Language poetry, Keatsian odes, unreliable narrators, personas, poetic sequences, rhythm, rhyme, transcription methods, the writing process, and more. While the strategies of explication differ from essay to essay, the nexus of each piece is an unveiling of the poetic history and poetic techniques within songs.

Charlotte Pence, Knoxville, Tennessee, the author of The Writer's Path: Creative Exercises for Meaningful Essays. She is also the winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition for her poetry in Branches.