Words and Music: Three Stories by Wyn Cooper

Some people don't know what to think when you tell them your two biggest influences are Lightning Hopkins and Robert Frost. —Townes Van Zandt

When I was a college sophomore in the late 1970s, I took poetry workshops from a noted narrative poet. The first week of class, he gave us a handout of poems and song lyrics, without identifying the authors. Not whole poems or entire lyrics, just snippets. We were asked to differentiate the poems from the lyrics. Not all song lyrics rhyme, and some of the poems he gave us did, so it wasn't as easy as it might sound. It was his way of showing us that poetry is superior to song lyrics, and we would have long discussions about the differences. They were enthusiastic discussions, because there was always someone—sometimes me—arguing that the Leonard Cohen fragment was better than the Dickey or the Snyder.

Looking back now, something strikes me as strange that didn't then: unlike many poets of his generation, my teacher was and is a narrative poet whose poems tell stories, just as many song lyrics do. I don't think he was opposed to the storytelling qualities of the lyrics he selected, it was more that he thought poetry is superior to song lyrics, and was perhaps worried his students would start basing their work on Dylan, Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and other songwriters. He wanted to draw a line in the sand, but in a certain way he was on the side of the line he didn't think too highly of, whether he knew it or not. For the record, he was a great teacher, if a bit old-school.

Much of the power of poetry, which began as song, is found in its sounds, whether hard or soft, vowel or consonant, whisper or wail. Listening to poetry requires concentration, as there's no music to listen to along with it. Whereas when I hear a song for the first time (and many times after that), I don't pay attention to the words. It's the music that moves me, makes me care or not care, and after that I can listen to the words. Listen to them consciously, that is. The words come through the mist of the music, so to speak, and our unconscious minds hear them whether we're trying or not. The words may be perfect as poetry, but if the music isn't compelling, I turn it off.

Poetry began as something that went with music, words that were read to the accompaniment of the lyre (those Greeks!), thus the word "lyric." Only very gradually, and only in some cultures such as ours, did a divide grow between the two. My former teacher's insistence on the difference between poetry and lyrics isn't so much a prejudice of his as a quirk of the cultural/historical moment, not a Truth but a chance meeting of place and time. To many people, the idea that poetry could exist without music is unfathomable. The printing press helped take music away from poetry, and recording technology helped bring it back

In 1984, while in graduate school at the University of Utah, I wrote a poem which I called "Fun." I sent it to many magazines for publication, with no luck. When I gave readings, I always read the poem, because I believed in it. I put it in my first book of poems, The Country of Here Below, published in an edition of 500 copies in 1987. From that time on, I never saw it in a bookstore anywhere. But in January 1993, Bill Bottrell and Kevin Gilbert, Sheryl Crow's producer and keyboard player, took a break from recording her first CD, Tuesday Night Music Club, for want of better lyrics to a tune they already had in mind. They went around the corner to Cliff's Books in Pasadena, where they found a used copy of my book. They liked the poems, thought they fit the raw feelings they were after in her songs, and bought the book. They took it back to Sheryl, and asked her to sing "Fun" to the music.

I wasn't there, but I'm told that it worked. They needed the song to take place somewhere, so they set it in Los Angeles, on Santa Monica Boulevard, by adding a chorus that repeats words from the first line of the poem. They took some of my words out as well, including "the genetic engineering lab," and you can hear why: it's hard to sing that phrase. Out of the original 36-line poem, 30 lines are used, and four are replaced by the chorus. Here's the poem: -

Fun

"All I want is to have a little fun Before I die," says the man next to me Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. He says His name's William but I'm sure he's Bill Or Billy, Mac or Buddy; he's plain ugly to me, And I wonder if he's ever had fun in his life.

We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday, In a bar that faces a giant car wash. The good people of the world are washing their cars On their lunch hours, hosing and scrubbing As best they can in skirts and suits. They drive their shiny Datsuns and Buicks Back to the phone company, the record store, The genetic engineering lab, but not a single one Appears to be having fun like Billy and me.

I like a good beer buzz early in the day, And Billy likes to peel the labels From his bottles of Bud and shred them on the bar. Then he lights every match in an oversized pack, Letting each one burn down to his thick fingers Before blowing and cursing them out.

A happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close To one another, like this is a motel, But they clean up their act when we give them A Look. One quick beer and they're out, Down the road and in the next state For all I care, smiling like idiots. We cover sports and politics and once, When Billy burns his thumb and lets out a yelp, The bartender looks up from his want-ads.

Otherwise the bar is ours, and the day and the night And the car wash too, the matches and the Buds And the clean and dirty cars, the sun and the moon And every motel on this highway. It's ours, you hear? And we've got plans, so relax and let us in— All we want is to have a little fun.

People have approached me over the years to tell me that when they heard "All I Wanna Do" on the radio, they knew it must be based on a poem, that there was just too much going on for it to be a traditional song lyric. I love these people and have had conversations with them about other song lyrics, whether based on poems or written as lyrics. There's never a consensus about which might be better, but to know that people still discuss such things is quaint, and lovely. I lean toward the opinion that if a lyric has to have music to make it art, it's not poetry. And it may not be poetry to begin with, as it wasn't intended to be treated as anything other than a lyric. Admittedly, "Fun" was written as a poem, not a song lyric. On the other hand, the lyrics I've written were certainly not meant to be considered poetry. They were written with music in mind.