Spending such time--so much time, I mean--teaching romance fiction this quarter that poetry has become extra-curricular again: inviting, escapist, romantic in its own right.
This is, I think, a very good thing indeed.
Bronk & Duncan, recently. And, for the plane tomorrow, Lisa Steinman's introduction to the art, which I've had on my shelf unread months now.
Easing back.
7 comments:
Eric, it sounds like you, poetry, and romance fiction are in an eternal love triangle. First one attracts you, but after a semester or so the novelty begins to wear off, so you're pulled back to the other, and so on.
Lucky Eric! With me, it's more like an orgy -- should I be faithful to poetry, or to gardening literature, or Ruskin, or science fiction/fantasy? (And then of course there's times I want to throw them all over & follow the exotic muse of paint & canvas...)
I wonder how popular music will fit in? I've been thinking that for the IASPR conference--which is supposed to be about romantic love in all media, not just in fiction--I should branch out & lead the way with music.
What's the best pop music criticism out there, Mark? You always come up with such good lists on your blog. I know Greil Marcus, but that's about it.
I don't know a great deal about popular music, and you may have been wanting to discuss pop songs sung/written by women, but it seems curious to me that fiction about romantic love seems to have ended up being seen as the preserve of women (unless it all ends tragically, in which case it still seems to be respectable for men to write about it), yet alongside that there's popular music which seems to have continued in the (very distant?) tradition of someone like Robert Burns and allows men to sing about love.
We're thinking along the same lines, Laura! As I've brainstormed about how popular music might differ from fiction--not just in the critical vocabularies / idioms needed to describe it, but in terms of contrasting topics, issues, and the like--the matter of gender kept coming to mind. If I do pursue this at Brisbane (and if I don't, I will later), I'll probably start with male singers & songwriters & groups. They've certainly been terribly influential in my own life--"terribly" in all senses of the word!
Of course, once you've opened the door to popular music, the boundaries of the "popular" also become quite porous, in interesting ways. Is Portuguese fado a popular music genre? A long tradition of high-art poetry being sung in fado, including Shakespeare sonnets in translation. Does that bring those sonnets into the purview of IASPR?
Hey, Mark--how about a piece about Gang of Four's "Anthrax" for us? Add another topic to your orgy?
They've certainly been terribly influential in my own life--"terribly" in all senses of the word!It seems to me that songs, like poetry, can be really good at expressing emotions in very intense ways, and they can be very pure emotions because they're not embedded in so many details about the development of a relationship and the personalities of particular characters. Some songs do give a bit of back-story, of course, but they focus in on a particular idea/time of life/problem/emotion.
That perhaps does make it easier to apply them to one's own life, or for the listener to feel less alone in her/his experience of the emotion described/evoked by the song. You can also let the song "speak" for you if you put it on for other people (e.g. romantic music for a first date, or angry, defiant music that some people have blaring from their car radios). Of course, some people do try to express their personalities through the books they carry around with them, but you can't evoke the mood from a particular romance novel just by carrying it around.
Another interesting difference between songs and novels is that songs get played over and over on the radio, on YouTube etc, so the most popular songs can bind together whole generations/evoke particular points in time for large numbers of people, but at the same time, and perhaps because they're so widely played, there seems to be more active debate about censoring some lyrics, and songs are maybe more likely to be sold with warning labels if the lyrics are deemed (by whom?) to be potentially offensive.
"Is Portuguese fado a popular music genre? A long tradition of high-art poetry being sung in fado, including Shakespeare sonnets in translation. Does that bring those sonnets into the purview of IASPR?"
Fado is probably a popular music genre in Portugal, but I'm not sure it could be described as a popular music genre in the UK. So what counts as "popular" must partly depend on the context, I suppose. It's a bit like the way wine-drinking is seen as an every-day sort of thing in much of Europe, but I get the impression that it would seem a more sophisticated thing to do in some social groups in/parts of America or the UK.
As for Shakespeare, although he doesn't tend to be published in chick-lit style covers like Austen, he's often inspired works of popular culture: West Side Story, Ten Things I Hate About You, Shakespeare in Love...
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