Lyrics v. Poetry
Just a little frustrating to read this article in the Guardian, written in the ever-rumbling wake of Bob Dylan's Nobel award, whilst remembering just how much my father, Michael Horovitz, has championed lyricists in his Poetry Olympics events and New Departures magazines over many decades.
He has continuously sought to pull down the barriers between poetry and music, performing poetry with musicians since the 1950s and encouraging others to do so, and introducing the likes of Paul Weller, Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, Damon Albarn, Nick Cave, Gwyneth Herbert, Peter Gabriel, Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer, Eliza Carthy, Ayanna Witter-Johnson and many more to print, or on stage, alongside poets, in very productive partnership and with equal respect.
Christ, even Kylie Minogue turned up at one event he put on at the Albert Hall and brought the house down with a mock-serious rendition of I Should Be So Lucky. A 13 year old Lily Allen jammed with her dad, Joe Strummer and Martin Carthy at one Poetry Olympics event.
I take particular exception to Blake Morrison's assertion that "Not many songwriters appear in poetry anthologies. Cole Porter, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are among those who have, or who deserve to, but the odds are always against it, both for good reasons (without voice, melody, orchestration and arrangement, few lyrics work on the page) and for bad (literary snobbery on the one hand, and the exorbitant cost of permission fees on the other). Karl Miller was sticking his neck out when he included “Eleanor Rigby” (and Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne”) in his Penguin anthology Writing in England Today (1968), along with Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Thom Gunn."
This is annoying, to say the least, when there have been songwriters in abundance appearing in every magazine and anthology my father has put out since 1980.
"But he was right to recognise its poetic resonance," Morrison continues, "from the surreal image of Eleanor Rigby 'wearing the face that she keeps in the jar by the door' to the detail of Father McKenzie “wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave”, it’s a plangent evocation of modern day loneliness."
I'd say that an equally plangent evocation of modern day loneliness is the tribal tendencies of humanity towards pulling up the drawbridge and yelling across them at anyone who thinks a little differently, be that in the arts, politics or simply in the supermarket at the hour when the discount stickers come out.
One of the things my father, and friends and associates such as Adrian Mitchell, have done best in their lives is to attempt to be inclusive of all, whatever their art form, background or opinion. It's not always worked out that way, but it is the attempt that is worth celebrating.
Their metaphorical drawbridges have rusted open, and to my mind that is a far better state to be in than keeping the way in to the castle locked tight and having to put up with all the awful rumblings on the rare occasions that someone on the inside deigns to lower them to let one of the chosen few in.
