Poetry and Pop
This seminar will convene a chorus of new approaches to the study of poetry and global pop music, sister arts dynamized by dizzying asymmetries. Where and when they are practiced as distinct or differently mediated forms of cultural expression, poetry and popular song are linked by histories both long and recent, by subject matter, by patterns of figural and prosodic design, and by their shared claims to those effects some call “lyric.” At the same time, the trajectories of literary modernism and commercial music refract this common ground beyond recognition. In 1939, Clement Greenberg could decry a self-evident chasm of cultural difference between “a poem by T. S.
