{"id":4168,"date":"2010-11-15T14:47:24","date_gmt":"2010-11-15T18:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=4168"},"modified":"2010-11-15T14:47:24","modified_gmt":"2010-11-15T18:47:24","slug":"poetic-champions-compose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/poetic-champions-compose\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetic Champions Compose"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That recent Lou Reed post<\/a> got me thinking, How does a rock and roller get to be labeled a \u201cpoet\u201d anyway?<\/em><\/p>\n

Do you have to declare it, like Jim Morrison?<\/p>\n

Do you have to have a lot of Bohemian affectations and let others christen you as such, like Patti Smith?<\/p>\n

Clearly Leonard Cohen is the real deal because before he was a songwriter he won that poetry award in Canada.\u00a0But are his lyrics poetry?<\/p>\n

Dylan will no doubt get mentioned here but I always got the sense that he\u2019s just messing with his fan\u2019s heads because they are so obsessive about trying to find some deep universal truth in everything he writes.<\/p>\n

Is Lou Reed, on his best day (say, “Venus in Furs”), really a poet?<\/p>\n

And where does all this leave someone like Smokey Robinson, whose lyrics are simple, and perfect for the songs they inhabit?<\/p>\n

Part of the problem here is that I haven\u2019t read a lot of poetry outside of Bukowski and some of standards that you have to read for high school, so maybe a lot of this stuff is great Poetry and I just didn\u2019t realize it.<\/p>\n

Are there songwriters that you consider Poets (as opposed to just very clever lyricists)?<\/em>\u00a0Please include an example of what you consider to be poetry in lyrics.\u00a0I think the criteria should be that the words stand on their own without the music.<\/p>\n

Previously.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That recent Lou Reed post got me thinking, How does a rock and roller get to be labeled a \u201cpoet\u201d anyway? Do you have to declare it, like Jim Morrison? Do you have to have a lot of Bohemian affectations and let others christen you as such, like Patti Smith? Clearly Leonard Cohen is the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[369],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}