Songs do not always have the precision of poetry, of course: Bono, for example, traffics in the classic mystic’s conjunction of “you” and “You,” addressing, you could say, a God and a goddess all at once, but what gives his verses their power is his delivery of them. Many other singers, though, having worked on their craft in song, then expand their range to the page. Though Dylan’s novels of the ’60s are never going to belong in the same sentence as those of Philip Roth, or even of Ken Kesey, his memoir offers discussions of the public self and meditations on the cost of mass appeal that few novelists ever address (if only because few novelists live in the vicinity of mass appeal). Cohen, in his new book, uses words like “marbled” and discussions of “the Nameless and the Name,” as if consciously to update Emily Dickinson’s songs from a room, even though he chooses at times, when the rhythm demands it, to turn the verses into song. The fact that so many of us can recite from memory the opening lines of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” need not disqualify it from serious consideration any more than the fact that many of us can also recall the words of “Jerusalem” (through numberless singings of the Blake poem at school).
A professional singer operates within limits that force her to think about rhythm and beat with every syllable, and has to communicate directly with an audience as only the most book-tour-weary of authors ever do (one reason, perhaps, why such performing poets as Allen Ginsberg almost hope to turn themselves into rock stars); she also works within such severe limitations of time that a whole narrative has to be spun out, or an emotion explored, in only three minutes (one reason why country-and-western songs so often have an unforgettable metaphor, and nothing else). In one of his songs Cohen intones,
“I will speak no more, I shall abide until I am spoken for if it be your will.”
and one does not have to worry all the meanings of “spoken for” to see that he has, effectively, condensed the monastic vow of chastity, poverty and obedience into eighteen words. (In 32 lines of the poem/song, there is not a single word of more than two syllables). As Dylan says in his memoir, songwriters have found, in slightly shifting choruses and the pulsing movement of their main verses, a way of telling stories just as ballads have always done; it’s no coincidence that one poem in Book of Longing is called “Lorca Lives,” another is written “after the poem by Lorca” and the author photograph on the back cover is taken by one Lorca Cohen, the poet’s daughter.
One would not wish to go too far in opening the gates of the canon to singers: the novels of Jimmy Buffett and Kinky Friedman are not going to qualify them for attention in Stockholm soon, and I have no wish to spend my summer with Nick Cave’s writings or Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries; The Eagles may have rung sardonic and lasting changes on the idea of California as a “last resort,” but that makes me no more eager to hear “Hotel California” yet again. Indeed, whenever anyone makes a claim for the poetic distinction of Neil Young (a musical prodigy who is also a one-man argument for the folly of even attempting rhyme), I race out of the room. Jim Morrison is no poete maudit just because he died too young.
Yet in the age of dissolving borders and people living outside the old definitions, the age of the blog, multi-media and novelists coming closer to including CDs, as well as playlists, with their books, it seems foolish to uphold too rigidly the divisions of old. Much of Harold Pinter’s finest work has taken place in that yet to be fully accepted form, the screenplay; Sam Shepard happens to have taken on the legacy of Eugene O’Neill and brought near-Biblical stories of Cain and Abel into the lonely American West at the same time as being a Hollywood heart-throb. One of Cohen’s discoveries in the mid-’60s was that distinction as a poet could be converted into real sales and influence by picking up a guitar and letting his elliptical verses settle insinuatingly into the ear as well as the mind.
Perhaps, in fact, it’s just the popularity of popular singers that seems to make them suspect to us, as they would never have been to Shakespeare or Dickens. Perhaps it’s felt that a gifted poet who decides to go for musical accompaniment is decorating his thought rather than deepening it, and choosing immediacy, even simplicity over real explorations. But then I pick up Book of Longing again, and am not so sure:
“You who were bewildered by a meaning, whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed — Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.”
These lines, taking their inspiration from Cavafy’s haunting “The God Abandons Antony,” were in fact first presented to us as a song, on Cohen’s “Ten New Songs.” Can you really say, in this case at least, where poet ends and songwriter begins?