It was lovely to hear Stephanie Burt and Kamran Javadizadeh discuss the relationship between popular music and poetry on Close Reading podcast this morning. Although this (blurry) distinction — and history— comes up in the poetry and music workshop I’m teaching, I’m not sure hard lines can be drawn between the song lyric and the poem.

That said, thinking about the text as a medium, considering (and taking seriously) the visual component of the page, leads me to Leonard Cohen. The layout of the song lyric tends to be vertical, drawing the eye directly down the page as opposed to moving across it. Another way to say this is that the song lyric, as distinguished from the poem, lacks a horizon; it doesn’t reach towards the edge; it is predictable in its motion downwards. As a result, song lyrics provide opportunities to study lineation and line breaks.

Notice the distinction between how Leonard Cohen presents the song lyrics for “Who By Fire” in the album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony v. the way he lineated “Who By Fire” when offering it to the reader as a poem in the book, Stranger Music:

Cohen used prose stanzas for several song-poems from New Skin for the Old Ceremony; the distinction is slight, but one can feel a difference in the motion (and perhaps the momentum) of the lyrics in the song v. poem lineation.

Another example: “I Tried to Leave You”. Here is how the lyrics are presented:

Here, the beat is exposed. Cohen’s written song lyric tells us how to play it, and line breaks function as beats that can be mapped over musical scores. Rhythm isn’t hidden. Lineation isn’t arguing with itself or revealing tension.

Contrast this with the way Cohen writes “I Tried to Leave You” in Stranger Music:

The point is that rhyme is difficult to un-hear, and one wonders if Cohen’s decision to work the lyrics horizontally is rooted in a desire to communicate their epistolary nature. The presence of an intimate interlocutor makes it easy to read “I Tried to Leave You” as a letter, and the horizontal energy leverages that.

In a similar vein, I keep thinking about how composer Erik Satie returned the spare melodic line to the piano composition. Driven by an intense loathing of Wagnerian bombast (and a mortal hatred of establishment composers), Satie to wage a sonic revolution at the level of the line, a revolution that relied on how he scored music differently.

The only person Satie looked up to was a female ghost associated with an imaginary cathedral. The experiment, for him, was central to creation. Satie rode the satirical edge, often quoting under other composers in his compositions to scandalize and mock them. But he lives in the lyric – and his compositions revolutionized the way composers thought of the score as text. Satie’s visual approach to scoring would influence John Cage, Avro Part, and others.

Back to Cohen, though. Here’s “Why Don’t You Try” as presented in Stranger Music:

Close-listening, to me, is as critical as close-reading.

Listen to the line-breath correspondence, listen to Cohen’s performance of “Why Don’t You Try”:

Because the song lyric relies on the rhyme to demonstrate breath and motion, the lineation often feels overdetermined—- it doesn’t make interesting use of rhyme. The magic is exposed by end-rhyme, and perhaps opportunity is squandered in this.

One of my favorite exercises is taking a song lyric and lineating it differently, playing towards, for example, a lineation that buries its rhyme, a lineation that makes visual the emotion of the song, a lineation that makes use of the field as diptych or triptych, a breathless lineation, a heavy-breathing lineation, a falling-from-the-top-of-the-world lineation, etc.

The poems that Cohen set to music tend to use end-rhymes as a motion-engine driving the lyric forward. And there are rumors that he felt self-conscious about this, since he dreamt of being a poet and wound up, in his determination (and after a bit of disappointment among the poetic circles of New York) a song-writer. To me, Cohen blurs this hard and fast distinction while emphasizing another difference at the heart of poetics, namely, the gulf between how a poem is read and how a poem is performed (or played).

The sound in our head is different from the sound received in public, among others, where volume, intonation, and pacing can be heard, and hearing is central to the presentation of the lyric material.

I leave you with “These Heroics,” a poem that Cohen never set to song: