The Albums I Did Not Choose Last Week But Could (Should?) Have

Last week when we defended songs as poetry, I felt obligated to write about a modern song because Mr. Heidkamp asserted that music has been steadily getting less complex and interesting (one student attributed this trend to the use of formulaic structures which seemed wrong headed to me at the time and even more so now that we have studied form poems), and I wanted to choose something that would contradict that.  This meant that some of the artists I would have chosen to do were out of the question (Bjork, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Love, and Neutral Milk Hotel), but I also had to chose a song rather than an album which seemed more natural to me.  I suppose if a song were a poem then an album would be a collection of poetry, but I think that many of the songs I listen to lose much of their power when not heard in the context of the album. If these rules had not been in place, I would have chosen either Bjork's Homogenic, almost any of David Bowie's albums, Joni Mitchell's Blue, Love's Forever Changes, or Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea.  And if I wanted to keep it a recent album I would have chosen TuNe-YaRdS's Whokill, FKA Twigs's LP1, or Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillian.

I could have just as easily chosen Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City, but I would have been worried that I would not get credit because Mr. Heidkamp used it as an example of modern lyrics that were not poetic.  He explained that he did not consider them poetic because they seemed to be more a collection of unrelated lines than a story.  As I said in class, I think that is too narrow a definition of poetry and disregarded the poetry that did not tell a clear story.  Someone else suggested that some songs are too repetitive to be poetic, which also seemed obviously wrong to me.  Upon hearing both of these comments dismissing song lyrics I thought of one of my favorite poems, "Howl."  Part 1 of the poem is a list of the things the narrator has seen the best minds of his generation do.  It is in no way a clear, conventional story with a three act structure.  Part 2 of the poem includes the word "molloch" 39 times which is more than ten percent of the words in the part. Does that mean that the poem considered by many to be the best poem of the Beat Generation is not poetic?  I think more likely it means that we have to avoid thinking of poetry as one fixed thing.  The definition of poetry in the article we read was very fluid, but somehow over the course of studying it, the definition we used became more rigid.