Quote:
Originally posted by The Tower
Leonard Cohen may be a poet, but he can't sing for crapola....
|
Gray was a poet:
Th' applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain & ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes.
I think it's a bit fatuous to call every last songwriter a poet, as if every nice little song were a poem. Most rock or pop songwriting is just bursts of images & feelings. Good poetry is a lot more than that: it doesn't just describe events or moods; it has to suggest meanings beyond the specific description, & its wording (as potentially intricate & complex as mathematical equations) triggers associations that usually don't occur to us. This is one of the basic formulas of good poetry: movement from the specific to the general.
But nowadays everyone has his own opinion of what constitutes poetry, & I'm not going to dip my feet any farther into that morass.