DiFranco and Dylan, Morrison and Eminem: Poets?

“Lyrics just don’t hold up without the music,” Billy Collins recently told The Wall Street Journal. “I assure them [his students] that Jim Morrison is not a poet in any sense of the word.”

Well then. Can songwriters be poets—ever? Kristan Hoggatt of the Smart Set seems to think so. She took issue with Collins’ quote and questioned how the most populist of poets could dismiss song lyrics as definitively not poetry. Read Hoggart’s eloquent treatise on the parallels between the genres— and why poets who polarize lyrics and poetry are doing both a disservice:

Years ago, taking my first ever poetry workshop in college, I was assigned to write an essay about the three poets who have influenced and inspired me. I didn’t even have to think about it; I knew off the bat who those three poets were: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Ani DiFranco. I can imagine now how my teaching assistant might have rolled her eyes at my inclusion of the last, but Ani DiFranco was a poet to me. She was the first musical artist whose words appealed to me more than her melody did — and naturally so. I was barely 20, recovering from the various wounds young girls of our age must recover from, and DiFranco’s words—sometimes belligerent, sometimes consoling — made sense of my experience. I quote from memory:

I do it for the joy it brings
Because I’m a joyful girl
Because the world owes us nothing
But we owe each other the world

Is that poetry? I can’t separate in my mind those words from the melody, so maybe Billy Collins is right. Personally, I don’t care. It seems to me that if those at the forefront of the poetry movement continue to use their power to push poetry out of the mainstream, they will get precisely what they’re asking for: poetry will continue to be regarded as obscure, academic, and out of touch with the allegorical Everyman, undermining the efforts of columns like mine, slam artists, and every elementary school teacher who attempts to get their kids hooked on poetry. And that’s a mistake nobody can afford to make . . .