Contemporary Poetry

: a web symposium  |  Spring 2006

Popular Music by Stephen Burt
Center for Literary Publishing / University Press of Colorado, 1999

Music and poetry are two things that have gone hand in hand for generations. The two art forms have been so integral to the development of each other that much of the music and poetry that exists today would not be possible were the two entirely separate from one another. While both music and poetry are incredibly influenced by each other, rarely do musicians or poets use this symbiotic nature as subjects in their works. Stephen Burt on the other hand uses his vast knowledge of music and appreciation for the works of other poets as the cornerstone of the pieces in his book Popular Music. From the blatantly musical tone and form of certain poems to his frequent use of tapping into his wealth of pop-culture references as the subjects of his poems, Burt shows that poetry is not designated to a specific set of rules. Through his use of pop-culture allusions, Burt manages to give a human voice to the surreal and a familiar meaning to the unknown. Popular Music is split into four different sections, each one encompassing a style of Burt’s writing that shows what makes his poetry unique from that of his contemporaries. By looking at the world we live in and the contributions we’ve made to it by way of music and literature, Burt reveals how we can gain a greater understanding of ourselves and those around us.

The first poem that appears in Popular Music is placed before the beginning of first section and sets the tone for the rest of the book. The title of “Persephone (Unplugged)” lays the groundwork for the speaker’s voice in the poem that becomes a constant theme in Burt’s writings as the book continues. According to Greek mythology, Persephone was the daughter of Zeus & Demeter who was forced to spend part of each year in the underworld after eating pomegranate seeds given to her by Hades after he had captured her. By adding “(Unplugged)” to the title of the poem, Burt provides an otherwise foreign speaker who seemed to be the subject of other people’s affairs with a voice of her own in a tone that a modern-day audience can relate to. “Unplugged” is a term coined by the MTV generation which refers to musicians who play their music using acoustic instruments rather than performing with electric instruments “plugged” into amplifiers. Acoustic performances in general are more stripped-down and personal for the performers with more emphasis being laid on the lyrical depth of songs instead of how the songs sound blaring through speakers (i.e.: Nirvana: MTV Unplugged in New York vs. Nirvana: Nevermind). In this particular case, Persephone is the one on stage who is voicing her emotions in a manner in which Greek Gods never speak and is finally given the opportunity to tell her story as though she were someone not unlike ourselves. A great deal of the poetry in Popular Music is essentially a way for Burt to unplug his own form of music and share it with his audience purely through his writing.

A writing device that Burt employs constantly in his poetry is to use numerous similes and metaphors in succession to emphasize a certain aspect of the poem’s subject to the reader. In “Persephone (Unplugged),” Persephone says “I am a tortoise shell, / A bell on an alarm clock, a Les Paul” (pg.1, lines 5-6) to express her feelings through metaphors. The unifying characteristic among all three metaphors is their hard outer shell that holds them together and makes them function as a being or an object (a “Les Paul” is an electric guitar made with a hard outer casing). The order in which the metaphors are used is also important in that they all appeared in history in chronological order, inferring that Persephone has maintained her hardened nature throughout the course of time. The repetition of the phrases “I wake in the dark” and “There are rarely men in my dreams” adds to the musical tone of the poem as well, like a chorus line that breaks up the verse. They also serve to stress the feeling of loneliness Persephone is experiencing while in the underworld, to the extent of bringing herself to question her physical being as a girl. Burt’s references to other poets both living and dead serves as an homage to individuals who have influenced his writings, to bridge the connection between poetry as both music and prose, and to act as a contemporary comparison to a subject matter that would be otherwise alien to the reader. The references to Ariel and “Sheep in Fog” by Sylvia Plath complement the dark nature of the poem along with making the dreamy imagery in a foreign setting seem that much easier for the reader to grasp. Like Plath, Persephone comes off as a misunderstood woman whose surroundings have imposed a bleak outlook on many aspects of her own life. Without the input of pop-culture examples of people, places, and things in his writings, much of Burt’s poetry would lose a great deal of its meaning and style as a whole.

The poems in the four sections that follow “Persephone (Unplugged)” all focus around their own certain themes and styles that serve to embellish the characteristics of Burt’s distinctive writing style. The setting of a poem and the various ways in which it affects the narrator or speaker is the prominent theme of the first section. While some poems focus on the Earth itself and its changing seasons as a general setting, many of the poems get much more specific with their locales (i.e.: having the speaker be on a train going to Grand Central Station in New York City or watching pigeons in State Square). Before Burt begins to concentrate on music’s influence in our world, he centers on the straightforward connection between man and the world we live in. In the same way many of Persephone’s emotions were a result of her living in the underworld, the ominous tone of the speaker’s voice in “A Barren Orange Tree” is a product of his interactions with those in the dismal atmosphere around him. The speaker compares his own being to that of an orange tree stripped of its fruit and leaves as a result of being ravaged by those more powerful than him. Not only does he develop a scorn for the world around him, but he is convinced that nature itself is conspiring against him and is only trying to make him feel worse about his present state. Even though there isn’t a rhyme scheme to the form of the poem, the repetition and italicizing of “Woodsman, cut my shadow from me, / Cut it off” (pg. 15, lines 5-6) after every sentence appears like a chorus line in a very somber jazz or blues song. Though music makes its first appearance in Popular Music by way of form, the second section adds to Burt’s emphasis on the importance of setting and begins to include names of actual musicians and songs to support his work.

The second section is the one area that actually lives up to the book’s title. The first poem in the section is “Mods” (slang for modern), a strange tribute to the British Mod-Rock bands of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The first four lines of the poem are taken from the opening lines of a New York Times review of the rock-opera Tommy by The Who, arguably the most successful British Mod-Rock band of all time. Everyone mentioned after that point seems to be oddly interrelated by way of the poem’s plot, with certain band members hitch-hiking home while others fantasize about genocide. Aside from the strange connection the musicians have in the poem, they were all at one time leading members of the Mod-Rock musical revolution during the 1960’s. Followers of the Mod revolution were typically youth that were obsessed with music and fashion who opposed the lifestyles of their elders. The Mod-Rock movement is a perfect example on Burt’s behalf of how music combined with poetry can shape our world and vice-versa. When Burt isn’t writing about music in his poetry, he writes in a way that way that would be fittingly accompanied with sheet music. “Rereading Science Fiction” is another poem in this section that reads so similarly to the song “Space Oddity” by David Bowie that the narrator might as well be Ground Control talking to Major Tom. The second section is the first real proof that music is obviously important as a subject in Burt’s poetry, in terms of both references and style.

The final two sections of Popular Music bring all the preceding styles together and combine them into a collection of lengthy poems. The subjects of most of the poems in the third section are famous paintings, sculptures, or photographs and told from the viewpoint of the artists who created them. Through this writing style, Burt is conveying his own thoughts on what he believed the artists’ intentions and inspirations were when creating their works of art. Burt’s style in the third section becomes a type of role reversal where the author becomes part of the audience in trying to understand what the artist is trying to achieve through his art. The same can be said for the final poem in the third section, “Posterity.” Even though “Posterity” isn’t the name of a poem by Randall Jarrell, who is in fact the subject of Burt’s poem, excerpts are taken from previous works of Jarrell’s and used to create an atmosphere necessary to understand his poetry from a third-person perspective. Though occasionally including references to places and pop-culture in the poems, Burt opts to place more importance on the narrator rather than the subject in the third section of Popular Music. Whereas the poems up until this point are very much exercises in showing what makes up Burt’s unique style, the final section returns to the theme of personal experience from the viewpoint of the speaker that was present in “Persephone (Unplugged).”

While Burt was previously writing from the perspective of the audience, he strays from this role in the fourth section and lets readers discover for themselves what he is aiming to achieve through his own art. “Persephone (Unplugged)” is merely a taste of what Burt ultimately leads the reader to, prepping his audience with three sections of different styles that would in the end come together to form the final product. As a result of the author synthesizing all of his previous styles at this point in the book, the poems in the fourth section are much more abstract in their meaning and overall presentation. A majority of the poems in the fourth section immediately present the setting of the verse that follows with titles named after real places. The three-part poem “Connecticut Toccata” opens with the line “Things are trying to be other things” (page 68, line 1), a phrase that envelopes a major aspect of Burt’s writing style which becomes more and more prevalent as the reader nears the end of Popular Music. Even the title of “Connecticut Toccata” is a thing trying to be something else, with a style of classical music being named after one of the fifty states. Where pop-culture was previously used to bridge a gap between the voice of the poem and the reader, it’s now exploited to make one thing be something entirely unrelated to the point where it shrouds the poem in obscurity.

Burt’s emphasis on setting, the unifying theme among the poems in the first section of Popular Music, is once again repeated in the first part of “Connecticut Toccata.” The poem starts off simply enough by describing a fall day in New England where “fire engines…cut the bulky traffic as our God” (page 68, lines 8-9) among the air of burning leaves while the statue of a Minuteman distorts the patriotic dream. With the scene already set for the reader, Burt is free to once again exhume his pop-culture wisdom in a cascade of similes and metaphors that make up the core of part two. With references to Walt Whitman, Merit cigarettes, and Coca-Cola, Burt gives the reader a basis of understanding to work with amongst his subtleties. “Connecticut Toccata” becomes an amalgam of more or less all the writing styles used throughout Popular Music by its third part. Part three begins with the image of “Lights [that] dangle from above the ice rink’s door” (page 70, line 1) and quickly evolves into a surreal sequence where fish begin feasting on things that are never found in ice rinks and a reference to statues being like the resolve held by John Milton’s daughters who would have to write down his novels because his blindness prevented him from writing by hand. Perhaps his most conceptual poem, Burt leaves the interpretation of “Connecticut Toccata” up to the readers and is finally given the chance to flesh out his poetry after perfecting his project over the course of three sections.

Art in all its forms has always affected the way people look at the world. Modern culture all across the globe is directly affected by art, whether it is by musicians, poets, or painters. Anything in this world can be understood as long as there is a comprehensible base of comparison to connect it with. Stephen Burt takes this notion and runs with it as the main source of inspiration for his book Popular Music. By looking at pop-culture, we can know the cultures of our past and come to the realization though times have changed, there is still much about our world that has stayed the same.

Further Reading

Burt, Stephen. Parallel Play. Graywolf Press, 2006

Burt, Stephen. “Poetry Criticism – what is it for?” Jacket Magazine, 2000. Article accessed May 4, 2006. http://jacketmagazine.com/11/burt.html

Wright, David. “An Interview With Stephen Burt.” Avatar Review. Issue 7. Spring 2005. Article accessed May 4, 2006. http://avatarreview.net/AV7/Wright.htm