The Swiftie and The Scholar - Dr. Uncle Jerry University: Poetry 101

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

We’re doing something a bit different today! Some conversations have popped up in various comment sections about why Uncle Jerry prefers specific types of poetry, and which lenses we use to dissect those poems, whether we’re talking about Charles Dickens, Emily Dickenson, or Taylor Swift. So Uncle Jerry put together a lecture explaining how and why he views certain poetic styles the way he does, and explains the different criticism styles and theories we use to understand a poem’s meaning and impact.Hope you enjoy! Please leave any questions in the comments that he can answer either here or in a later episode. Works Cited:Marxist Literary CriticismPost-Colonial CriticismReader-response theoryKey Theories of Wolfgang IserIs There a Text in This Class? – Stanley Fish – Aff LinkPsychological CriticismFeminist TheoryNew CriticismFelicia Dorothea HemansOn the Intentional FallacyHyperion – John KeatsAffective FallacyQueer TheoryDeconstructionSemioticsCritical Race TheoryNew HistoricismStephen Greenblatt and New HistoricismSketches by Boz – Charles Dickens – Aff LinkSonnetsShakespeare's Sonnets & Poems – William Shakespeare – Aff LinkLimerickHaikuBallad Meter (or Common Measure)VillanelleConcrete PoetryLife Studies – Robert Lowell – Aff Link The Collected Poems – Sylvia Plath – Aff LinkMy Papa’s Waltz – Theodore RoethkeThe Real Slim Shady – EminemCan Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture Paperback – Dana Gioia – Aff LinkA Bit Much – Lyndsay Rush – Aff LinkLyndsay Rush – InstagramAmanda GormanThe Swiftie and The Scholar Grading MatrixFollow Us:Patreon⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠Threads⁠Angela’s Instagram⁠Uncle Jerry’s Instagram

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Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify Advertising. You're among fans. Here's another confessional poet, another guy, and I really do like this.

You may recognize this. May I have your attention, please? May I have your attention, please? Will the real slim, shady, please stand up, I repeat. Will the real slim shady please stand up? Hello, Uncle Jerry. Hello, niece Angela. What you got for us today?

I feel like you're going to teach us today. We are, I'm in my professorial mode. And your Ravenclawmeller? I have my ravencloth shirt and my professorial jacket on. What house do you think I'm in? What house do you think I'm in? What house? Are you going to be offended if I give you the wrong one?

No. Because people are. No. Let me think. Hufflepuff. Yeah. All right. You're going to turn that letter.

Oh, yeah. So we don't have shiny heads. How's that? Yeah, perfect. Yes, you're a Hufflepuff? Yeah, I think so. I'm definitely a raving claw. Hufflepuffs are all those leftovers, you know?

Oh, they're not leftovers. You've got the evil kids, the smart kids, the brave kids, and the rest of the kids. You know, Gryffindor is overrated. I'm sorry to all you who are Gryffindores, but, I mean, you know, Ron Weasley is a member of Gryffindor. I'm pretty sure, like, you talked about Ron Wiesley on the very first episode of this podcast. I probably did. I probably did. Yeah, I mean, Hermione, you know. The sorting hat, you know, I have a sorting hat around here somewhere.

The sorting hat wanted to put Hermione in Ravenclaw. But she wanted to be dashing or heroic or something. Heroic, yeah, I guess. Okay, so today we're going to talk about poetry, basically. We're going to talk poetry, yes. Because. Because. Do you want to tell why?

Well, so people have asked me, what do I have against confessional poetry? And honestly, I don't have anything against confessional poetry. It's not my favorite style generally, but to be honest with you, many of my favorite poems are confessional poems. You know, so, I mean, I want to talk about literary theory. I want to talk about types of poetry and why in particular. confessional poetry always makes me like I have a tick. Okay, okay. Yeah, and this came about because in one of the song reactions that was posted to Patreon,

I don't even remember which one now, you asked, just a quick one off, do you ever get tired of her confessionalist lyrics? And I said, no, not even a little bit. And the people on Patreon heard that and ran with it. And there were a lot of theories as to why maybe women like confessionalist poetry more than men might. But I think it really comes down to there's just like you have your personal preferences on what kind of any kind of media or art you like. And that's just kind of what it comes down to. But that did kind of open up a broader discussion of, you know, our muses, you know, people were also talking about muses.

and like how we try on this podcast, I really try to not bring the muses super far into it just because I just not just not to what we're talking about here. You can go learn about that from literally anyone else. But I do think they are an important part of the conversation about art in general. Right. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so we're just kind of, Uncle Jerry's going to really take us to school today, really teach us, and we're going to talk about all the things. I'm just going to be chill today because, well, because I told Angela we should be sitting on a couch.

But, yeah, you know, I think some of the comments suggested that it could be an attack on feminism or that confessional poetry is more aligned with women's voices. And I don't think so at all. I mean, there are plenty of male confessionalists. and so that's not at all the reason why, you know, I always, I have to get into a confessional poem. There was also a question about, oh, you know, whether or not it's too biographical for me. You know, I constantly say I don't want to get into biographical criticism, which has to do with literary theory. Okay. Okay.

One of the reasons why I sidestep biographical criticism is because it's not my own. my job. You know, when you pitched the Swifty and the scholar to me, you said you knew everything Taylor Swift and that I, my job would be to read the poems as literature. Right. Right. And so I don't know, I didn't know. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm finding out. Yeah, you're learning. And I have made Taylor Swift biographical predictions about some of the poems. but yeah so I someone joked that by the time we finish all of the songs I'm going to be the

Swifty and you're going to be the scholar I think that we are both trending in that direction I think you're correct yeah yeah but yeah I mean my job is really not to be the biographical critic my job is to be strictly more strictly the literary critic so I'm you know I see that that role pretty clearly

Yes. Which brings me to talk about literary theory. Okay. And why Uncle Jerry sidesteps biographical criticism other than the fact that you simply are doing the biographical criticism. Okay. Okay, so let's talk literary theory. Oh, he just, oh, my God.

So. He said, hold on, I need to get a prop. And I was like, okay, he's looking for your book, but why is he leaving the room? The books are in this. room. No, it was a pipe. I have books. I have books all over the house. So, so, it's hard to talk with this in my mouth.

It also tastes faintly of tobacco. Oh my gosh. What a shock. So, there are, there are a lot of different, I'll pick it up when I need it. Okay, okay. There are, it's actually carved. It's got like a little carved bowl. Do you like it? Yeah, it's really pretty.

Nice. It's not mine. So I made a list of different types of literary theory that is how you approach literature as a critic. Okay. And there are several of them. These are the ones that occurred to me most readily. So I just made a list. And some of them we've talked about, and some of them I made kind of a secondary list of stuff that I think is important. So I'm just going to dive in. Okay. Okay. So one that I personally don't use a great deal is Marxist criticism. Okay. Okay. So that's approaching a work and looking at it, analyzing it from the standpoint of its economics.

Okay. From the standpoint of class struggle or social power structure. Interesting. Now, I really do think that we could do a Marxist critical review of her work. Probably so, yeah. Right? Because, I mean, we're, we're, we're, we're, We just finished doing the prophecy.

And in the prophecy, she talks about, I don't need all this money. You know, she'd rather have a relationship. Well, you know, it's easy for someone with money to say, I don't need this money. So depreciating the value of money demonstrates that she is of a class that doesn't already need money. Right. Agreed. Right. And so you could do a Marxist critical analysis of that.

She's written a poem about a very wealthy dance entrepreneur from whom she bought a house. house, right, that is essentially a mansion where she throws relatively lavish parties. Right. You know, and when we talked about that, when we talked about her, it being a great Gadsby's sort of foundation. We could talk about that through Marxist critical theory. Yes. Right. So that would be one approach.

Okay. So, you know, we could go back through and we could list all the ones where she talks about economics or class struggles. You know, I got the feeling when we were doing August. Betty and Cardigan, you know, I wondered as kids, you know, how August and the guy and Betty, James. Yeah. You know, they were young. They mentioned a rusty door, maybe an old car, you know, so clearly there is a class or social power differential.

Right? Yeah. I mean, all these things come out when you take that particular critical approach. Okay, yeah. Okay. So Marxist criticism was very popular. in the 1930s, 40s, 50s. And, you know, can you tell me why?

Because of the Great Depression. Yeah, we have the Great Depression going on. We have the rise of communism. You have the Soviet, the Bolshevik Revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Republic in 1990, 20, 21, 22, you know, books like Animal Farm. Right. You could go have a field day with Marxist criticism in Animal Farm.

Okay, yeah. Yeah, I do think that you could do the same thing with Her Works. I just don't tend to go that direction, but that would be, I think, a good place to go. Okay, so another one that occurred to me was post-colonial criticism, and that looks at culture through colonization, culture through the dominance of European power structures, focusing on issues of power. You know, I had to trouble with that. You know, maybe if we were going to do Taylor Swift as post-colonial work, we could look. we could look at how she battles large record companies. Okay, okay, yeah.

There's some of that, yeah. Yeah. But her kind of nostalgic affinity for the English landscape to me does not really fit into post-colonial criticism very well. So I just skipped that one right by. I said, no, we're not doing that. I have talked before about reader response criticism. So, I mean, you would laugh to see my text on reader response. It's by Wolfgang Eser.

He's, you know, very famous, very important in reader response theory. And I literally have read the cover off. It's on a bookshelf in the other room. And there's no cover. And I wrote Reader Response rhythm, a black pen. Like, this is just this. So, yeah, reader response theory is when you focus on the reader's experience and interpretation. So we talk about that a lot with Taylor Swift, right?

Because you do that a lot. Yeah. And because she's still with like she's still alive. So we're seeing it in real time. Like her art is here and now. We're not looking at like Dickens from from now to then. You know, like we're in it with her. And I could do read a response theory with Dickens.

You know, how do I, how do I experience him now? But it would be a different kind of criticism than if you asked a Dickens reader in 1939, you know, when Mr. Pickwick the Pickwick paper is coming out or he's getting ready to write Nicholas Nickleby or Oliver Twist his earlier novels. Yeah, she's a different perspective.

Right. Well, and they were published periodically, right? So they were published monthly in these little blue binders. And, you know, it's a whole new perspective when you read three chapters and then have to stop and wait a month. Right.

It's like, oh, what's going to happen to pour Oliver next? You know? Yeah, read her a story. Response theory was very popular. It emerged in the 1960s and 70s. So, I mean, you got to understand I was developing my academic career. I mean, I went to college undergraduate in the 70s, but really, really working in the late 70s and 80s. On a lot of my graduate work, you know, I got my master's in history and then masters in literary theory, essentially, you know.

And before I got my PhDs later, the MA in English in the 80s really was a lot of reader response theory. I mean, I really liked it, became very interested. And I wanted to see how people emotionally respond to work, individually, experientially respond to work. And so we do talk about that a lot. And I wrote a lot about it. It's like active engagement. It's interpretive communication. It's transactional.

you know what does she say versus what do I think and how do I how do I think um you know it has certain it has certain advantages to it because it validates the reader like it validates you when you listen to one of her songs and you resonate with it right yeah I mean that's kind of I think the whole thing yeah that's like when I was writing notes for this conversation that was kind of the whole thing like her words make us feel seen heard understood validated her being vulnerable right does that for us, you know? So, you know, I mean, I read Wolfgang Isser. Stanley Fish is a big practitioner.

Stanley Fish wrote this text called, Is There a Text in This Class? Okay. Yeah, and it's in part about reader response theory. It essentially validates your ideas, your feelings about her text because of the way you respond to it. Right. Right. And so it's also very popular among just your average general. General Reader. Right. Yeah, because that's how, that's how

the rest of us that aren't, you know, academics, we're just, we're, we're, we're going to art to help us understand what we're feeling and how the world is working around us, kind of. Visit BetMDMdm casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly,

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Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. with a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. So then we have psychological criticism. Okay. And we've talked a little bit about that. You know, I've said, gosh, I wish we had a psychologist here to psychoanalyze some of this.

So psychological criticism evolves out of Freud and Jung, C.G. Young, Carl Gustavus Jung. You know, they look and they ask questions about, you know, we have multiple sides of our mental processes. We have the id and we, you know, so how do we think about those things? How do we express ourselves? It analyzes things about not only what does the writer write, but why might the writer write that in the interiority of their mind? Okay. You know, and so. Yeah, what's going on in there?

What's going on in there? Yeah. And you guys have all had that experience where you say something and then you say, gosh, I wish I hadn't said that or why in the world did I say that? You know, and there are reasons. And there are times when writers write and they themselves don't even understand the reasons. Right. So psychological criticism is great.

I have not done it a lot. You know, I was required to do it once in grad school with Tesla, Derbaville. but, you know, I haven't done it a lot. Feminist theory, feminist critical approach, we've talked about that a lot. And so I have to say, I have a big feminist. One of the reasons why I adhere to things like reader response or feminism is because they evolved during my lifetime. Okay. Okay.

That makes sense. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to say this again here in another minute about things that evolved outside of my lifetime. And I don't mean to say that Jerry's life is the only important critical life ever lived. Yeah, but it's how you view the world. This is how I was taught. Right? Yeah.

I was taught a lot of feminist criticism. It is, it's, it's, when I say feminism, I'm talking about the critical theory, not feminism, the social movement. Right. Okay. So it is an academic political discourse that analyzes the causes, the creation of gender, the ideas of inequality, the ideas of inequality. equality, how we express patriarchal expression or oppression. It can also focus on intersectionalism. Yeah.

You know, how different genders, races, classes, sexual experiences work. Right. Right. So, you know, key ideas are I made a list, patriarchy, gendered expression, agency, empowerment, social construction, gender. She certainly talks about the patriarchy a great deal. You know, she talks about gender depression, gendered language, a great deal.

So, yeah, again, this is something that I grew up with. It emerged out of the 60s and 70s. That's when we were rediscovering writers who were women, who had a really great voice, but whose voices were buried by essentially patriarchal criticism. Right.

So, you know, you have people, I don't know, like one of my favorites, I wrote a paper about her, delivered a paper at a conference once about Dorothy of Felicia Heemans. Okay. You know, she was considered a great poet in the early 1800s and mid-1800. She was always listed along with Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley and Heemans. Okay. Right? And most people had never heard of Dorothea Felicia Heemans.

She has reemerged with this feminist. idea. Interesting. Taylor has a song called Dorothea. Oh, does she read it? Yeah. Oh, that's fun. Yeah.

Okay. See, that's why you're here. Okay. So here's the big one. I'm going to talk about new criticism. Okay. And I have just, I've thrown out the term before, but I don't know that everybody always understands what new criticism.

Yeah. It evolved out of formalism, a, of look, at the work formally and by looking at it structures of the text itself and examining elements in it like irony, metaphor, simile, assinence, alliteration, all the stuff that I do. We do. Every one of those. Yeah, exactly. This is what we do.

So new criticism is a 20th century evolving literary theory, a literary practice. It is often called closed reading. Okay. Okay, because the idea is, number one, it focuses on the text. Okay. Number two is it rejects external content. Okay, so we're only looking at what's written on the page. Just the text.

I don't care when the author or who the author is, when the author's born, how many kids they might have. What their gender is, maybe? Their gender is. Yeah, I don't care anything about that. Give me the text. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to have to say that most of my teachers were new critics.

Okay. Okay. So when I went to grad school in English studies, I mean, you realize I went both in English and history, but in English studies, these are people like, like the progenitors of new criticism are people like Cleonth Brooks and John. Crow Ransom, John Crow Ransom wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, but he's also a critic. Okay. And they taught my professors, my professors taught me. So please forgive me. I am, I have new criticism embedded in my brain.

Okay. You know, to just look at the text itself, do a close reading of the text itself, and don't look at biographical. elements. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So you were taught, like, biography, that. Yes. So when you pitched the idea for this series and said, you'll provide the biography, I'll just read the text. I thought, wow, I can do that. Yeah, yeah. Right? Or, yeah, I can do that. So along with new criticism, there's something called.

of the intentional fallacy. Okay. So the intentional fallacy is mistakenly believing that the author's intent determines the work's meaning. Okay. Yeah. So I think this is worth talking about. And I still, you're not going to shake this loose from me. I have moved on from new criticism.

Okay. I'm going to tell you in a minute what I tend to adhere to mostly. It tends to be feminism and another perspective. Okay. But I still cling to the intentional fallacy. The mistaken concept that what the author's life is equals what their work is. Yeah. Understand, first of all, that we cannot always know that.

Correct. Right. Now, Taylor Swift is still alive. You know, thank goodness. And she's living in great life. and she posts things, she does podcasts, she and Kelsey go on their on his podcast and they talk, she goes on talk shows, she produces videos, right? So we have a lot of biographical evidence, and I know it feeds into that idea of biographical criticism,

but it engages in the intentional fallacy to believe that something that she says she did is exactly what she means when she writes. Agreed, yeah. Okay, so that. We know a little, but we don't know everything. That's right. Yeah, that's right. We're not in her life.

Sometimes the authors themselves don't know. You know, I have multiple examples where an author has been interviewed or writes years apart, and they will say one thing about a work, and then they'll say another thing about a word. Yeah, because art is just, it's an expression of literally right that moment. Right. I mean, sometimes, I guess. I guess not always. But, like, I'm feeling this in this moment, or this just is coming through me.

Like I've heard a comedian that I like and he talks about writing his stand-up and he's like, I just feel like it's the, he says it's like the divine passing through me. Like I'm just a vessel. Like this is coming from somewhere else and it's just coming through me and out of me type thing. And so that's kind of, I always think of that when we're having these conversations because it's like, yeah, maybe Taylor doesn't even know why she's writing some of this stuff down. It's just like she's the vessel. Now we go back to, you know, psychological criticism. Yeah. Well, and you were talking about muses, you know.

I mean, John Keats writes a great introduction to that question of what is a muse and where does it come from? He writes this poem Hyperion, and he really intended to turn it into an epic. And unfortunately, he had tuberculosis and died. Oh, dear. Relatable. Right. It's just kind of awful. but, you know, he's actually asking, where does poetic inspiration come from?

You know, it's like that poem owed to a nightingale, you know, where do we hear the song of the nightingale? How do great poets? I mean, I've read some things that are so surpassingly beautiful, and they affect me personally. And I think, man, how does a person get that? Where do you get that inspiration? Yeah, I feel like that about Taylor. Is it God? Is it?

You know, is it embedded in her past experiences? Is it her, you know, current life? I don't know. Yeah, or things she's read before or TV shows she's watched or anything, like for anybody. I mean, it can come from anywhere. However, when I say I read things and I say, this is so surpassingly beautiful, I may be engaging in what is called the affective fallacy. Okay.

That new critics also want to avoid. Okay. So they want to avoid the intentional. fallacy of thinking that there's a one-to-one relationship between the author's life and the work. And then there's the affective fallacy, which is mistakenly judging a work by its emotionally effect on the reader. So this belies reader response theory. So this, so, yeah, these different theorists argue with each other.

So just because you say that work always makes me cry, you know, I might think it's silly. or I might think it's funny or it may affect me just the same or it may affect me differently and the affective fallacy is believing that the work is inherently something, inherently sad, inherently engenders

and emotion because your emotional response my emotional response might be different. Interesting. I've got an example and it's terrible and you have to understand I was very young at the time. Okay, I don't know. I don't like where this is going to already.

So I took your aunt Diana. She took me, I should say, to the movie Love Story. Okay. And I'm not going to spoil anything because the girl dies. Okay. And we learned that in the very first line. Ryan O'Neill is sitting on a park bench leaning forward and he says, what do you say about a 23-year-old girl who died?

And I don't know. It was my mindset. It was because I was like a 20-year-old jerky guy, but I laughed out loud. Oh, no. He said, what do you say about the dead girl? And I went, no, in a silent theater. And you're at Diane, looked at me and went, I don't know about this guy.

I know. I think I'm turning red. It was awful, and it was a juvenile response. But, you know, you can't evaluate work based on that. Right, okay, because you laughed, but... That's right. It was a part of my, you know, my young life. It was an inappropriate response.

It was because I was not expecting to hear the end of the story in the first line of the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it just struck me as funny, and it is the affective fallacy to believe that my response is the response. Gotcha, okay. Or is inherent in the work. So new criticism, very important. I like it a lot. But I understand why people say, oh, but I want to know all about her life.

Right? Yeah. The one I like the best. Okay, so I don't want to spend too much more time on criticism. I've got a lot listed. Queer theory, deconstruction, critical race theory. Maybe I can take pictures of these. I think, structuralism.

And post it. Semiotics. Yeah. Semiotics. Semiotics. That's looking at signs. Saral's work on sign imagery so that systems of signs

like Taylor's consistent use of cars Okay, gotcha. Okay, why does she use cars? You know, how does it transition from one poem to another poem to another poem to another poem? How does cars signify? Gotcha, okay.

So, you know, signifying is something big in semiotics. And you could do a semiological study of her work, you know, just with cars. Yeah. Or, you know, and one of the other ones I mentioned, her dancing by light, right? So what is the light, what does it sign to me? What does it signify to me? Why dancing, you know, is dancing a collaborative thing?

Is it because you're together with another person? Is it because they're alone? Are they illuminating because they are luminous together, self-luminousness? You know, are they illuminated because, so, you know, we can do a lot with semiotics. Okay, Jerry's personal favorite is one that emerged in the 80s and 90s. So if I'm not doing linguistic criticism,

which I really like, minor on my PhD in English was linguistics. You know, same for my MA. I really, really enjoyed linguistics. But the one that really emerged that caught me was, New Historicism. Okay.

Okay. So New Historicism has also been called cultural studies or cultural criticism. It analyzed the text by connecting it to cultural, political, social history of the time it was written. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And the great Bible of New Historicism is written by Stephen Greenblatt. And I've got them up there, but I won't jump over you. Okay. Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicism I mean it essentially says that you do contextual analysis of the work you look at the influences the key figures the cultural materialism the subjectivity of the work

the intertextuality of that work with other works I think I'm doing this a lot I mean if I were to sum it up in a phrase I would say New Historicism in a way, expresses the idea that there is not a single author for a work. Risa's knows a thing or two about great combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter, obviously, but there's more than one way to Rises. From indulgent Riesces Big Cups with caramel to crunchy Riesces pieces and Riesce's miniatures,

there's a delicious Rises for every mood. It's the same combo you love, just with more ways to enjoy it. So whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Reese's. Okay. Okay. So, there you go. Here's Dickens' sketches by boss. Okay.

Okay, it's a series of little sketches that Dickens wrote early, fairly early in his career, and they're all illustrated. You know, when he writes this work, the new historicist has to ask, is Dickens, the only author here. Well, he's responding to sketches by boss, literal illustrations by an artist. He also is embedded in the early

Victorian age. And so, you know, when Dickens writes hard times and it's about coal riots or when he writes Nicholas Nickleby and it's about Yorkshire schools that are oppressive, you know,

When he writes Oliver Twist about the orphanage asylums and the problem of orphans and poverty in the streets, you know, when he writes Christmas Carol. Yeah. You know, if you think about that, all of that is developed within the context and embedded in the cultural contextuality, the figural contextuality of everything that happens in the 1830s and 40s and 50s and 60s. without that cultural context, there would be no dick and this novels. Yeah, those novels would be different if they're written today, that they wouldn't be about orphans. Right, yeah, exactly.

So, you know, you have to say, you know, that Taylor Swift is her work, her body of work, is from a new historicist's standpoint, highly embedded in an age. Yeah, absolutely. Right? So you look at that poem, the New Romantics. And we talked about that, right? So New Romantics is a type of music that evolved in the 1980s. She surely was exposed to that, you know, the style, the hairstyles, the dress, all those things.

She reflects. New Romantics refer to the old Romantics, right? Romanticism. And we've seen the poem The Lake Poets. Yes. Right? So she doesn't write those poems if she doesn't, if she is not culturally embedded in those historic movements. So new historicism is that type of criticism that says we're, you know, we're going to look at not just, you know, not the biographical, but we're going to look at the text with its whole cultural milieu.

Yeah, I like that a lot because that to me makes the most sense because I think the day that we talked about, the day I pitched this podcast to you, and then we went off, we were like sitting on the couch and you just went off talking for like 20 minutes and you were talking about some of this. And I was like, yes, this is the podcast. This is it right here. We talked about that and that has stuck with me where the, just thinking about Taylor, the poems, the songs that she write, are so specifically 2000s, you know what I mean? Like they're so specific to a time and to like a millennial woman

and that these exact songs just aren't going to exist at a different time. Right. And the way that we all bring them to life as well, I feel like is like kind of a next step of that because we're all still living here with her, you know? Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

I'm going to make a new historicist out of you. I do like it. I like it a lot. It doesn't, I mean, just because you're, you know, another way of putting it is a cultural critic, you know, I'm a member of the American pop culture association. I've read papers there, and so I really do enjoy cultural criticism. I like bad novels written of an age. Like, I read really bad novels from the 1910s and 20s. I collect them.

I have a whole shelf in the other room. because I'm interested in hearing these voices of the past. You know, when I read a misogynistic novel called No Man to Guide Her, that was written just prior to 1919 and the vote on the 19th Amendment. Yeah, it's clearly an anti-women's vote novel, you know, and it's a novel of its age, and I want to see that. I want to feel that. Yeah, you get like what it was like to live.

live there a little bit. Yeah, I can't live there. You know, I can read newspaper articles, I can read magazine articles, I can look at illustrators and listen to music, and I can read these novels and works of literature that give me little slices of culture, little slices of life that help me understand a historical perspective. Yeah. I like that. Yeah.

Yeah, this is, you know, my degree in history is really literary history. So it's, yeah, it really does combine that. So let me wrap all this up. Okay. This is one of the reasons why I stay away from biographical criticism, is that's your job. And it's not because I don't think her life is important. Of course it is.

Right, right, right. And it's not because I don't think it influences her work. It surely does. But I do have to say that I was raised in the climate of new criticism, which says the text itself. Yeah. And then I went on to linguistic criticism, cultural criticism, new historicism, feminism, feminism. And so I've got other approaches, you know, and it doesn't, you know, there's no one right approach.

I think that all the different approaches help us strip away the thematic elements and help us understand and appreciate her work. Yeah, it kind of feels like all the different approaches. Like, say, if I'm just talking about Taylor and we're talking about now, we're talking about, so if we talk about all the different Taylor content creators, we have some people that are looking at it specifically biographically. You know, they're just, they're telling us these are the things that happened in Taylor's life and this is how it made it onto this album. Right. And then we have some people that are looking just at the music and saying she does these things in the actual music and that means this. we find in the text. And then we're doing what we're doing where you're kind of taking some of these lenses and looking at it through that. And that, to me, all of that together provides a greater picture

and a greater perspective than just one of them, you know? Yeah. I'm, you know, I think that in criticism as with literature, there is no best. Right. You know, there are different approaches, and, you know, it really depends upon how you apply those different approaches. Okay. Have I adequately discussed why I stray away from biograph? Okay. Going to move on to confessionalism and types of poetry. Okay.

Chapter two. Chapter two. Types of poetry. So a couple of weeks ago, I suggested, you know, I'd really like to see her rewrite this. in another form. And someone objected that. It was Mad Woman. That's what it was. Oh, Mad Woman. Okay.

Yeah. And it's funny because I had one person who said, oh, you know, I just wanted to do that because I don't like confessional poetry. And no, I was really talking about the form and not necessarily the style of the poetry. So what I meant was rewrite it as a sonnet, rewrite it as a villainal or something like that. And it's really interesting because we had another person really take that to heart, and he rewrote it as another form of poem.

Yeah. And he said it was a great exercise. See, I think that's incredibly cool. Yeah. You know, for example, I've mentioned sonnets before. Okay, so a sonnet is a form of poem. You know, probably most of you know this. It's a 14-line poem.

It has 10 syllables per line, usually. and usually they're an iambic pentameter. So you have unstressed, stressed, unstressed, unstressed, unstressed, unstressed, unstressed, unstressed, so it goes, bam, papam, papam, papam, papam, papam, you know. So it has this particular rhythmic pattern. It usually divides into two sections or four sections.

So if it's an Elizabethan or English sonnet, it has three quatrains, three, four-line sections, and a couplet. Okay. And if it's a Petrarchan or an Italian form sonnet, it has an octave, eight lines, and then a Sestet, six lines. Okay.

Okay. Why divide it up? Well, because it has what we call a Volta. Okay. A Volta is a change. So if you're writing a Petrarchan sonnet, for example, the first eight lines set up a situation, or ask a question, or pose a problem.

and then the last six lines are the Volta, the change. Those last six lines provide an answer to the question or a comment or a solution to the problem, right? A comment on the situation. So let's take August. Okay. Wouldn't it be fun to write August as a Petrarchan sonnet? Yeah. So you write the first eight lines.

and you talk about August meeting him, picking him up, you know, making love, talk about the seaside, you know, talk about the shopping center, right? But then talk, then the last six lines, the Volta would be, but Summer's gone now and he's gone. And I haven't heard from him and I wonder what all of this meant. Okay, yeah. Right. Yeah, very fun. So, yeah, you could take the concrete-specific elements, and you could take even some of her poetic and descriptive elements,

some of her imagery, the narrative elements, and you could rewrite as a sonnet, as a Petrarchan sonnet, in an octave and a cestead. Oh, my gosh, someone do that for us in the comments right now. Right now. Do it, do it, do it. Oh, but wait, you have to have a specific rhyme scheme. Okay.

So usually the Patrarchan sonnet has an A, B, B, B, A, B, B, A, B, B, A. C-D-E-C-E-Rime scheme. Okay. So the octave has an interlocking rhyme, and the Sestet has an interlocking rhyme. Different one. Right. Okay. Right.

The Shakespearean sonnet has a different rhyme scheme. So it has three quatrains, three groupings of four lines, A-B-B-A-B, C-D-D, E-F-E-F, G-G. Okay. Okay. Okay. You know, the, the, the advice. advantage of the Patrarchan sonnet is you have more time with the Volta to explain what your answer is or what the response is. Right, through six lines.

Yeah. The advantage of the Shakespearean sonnet is you can develop three different thoughts about it, three different quadrants, and then you kind of smack the reader in the face with a quick couplet. Okay. Right. Shakespeare does this all the time. I mean, read his 154 sonnets and, you know, go back and read him, and you'll see that he, he, he, he, turns the sonnet really fast sometimes on the last two lines. Yeah, okay. Right?

And so it's fun. I mean, you could rewrite August as a Petrarchan sonnet and then rewrite it as a Shakespearean sonnet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And kick the Volta out real fast with the couplet at the end. Interesting. Oh, it's nice when I go home and... Yeah, well, and poets do this, right?

The poets want to exercise their chops. Of course, yeah. Right? So I'm not saying that August would be a better poem as a sonnet. I'm just saying that it would be a fun poetic exercise, right? And there are a lot of different forms. I mean, you know, when you were in elementary school, didn't you write a haiku? Yeah.

Right. So could you rewrite, I don't know, cardigan as a haiku? Well, not how much to work with there in a hikoo, but yeah, that's a fun. But the reduction to the essentials would teach you something as a poet. Yeah, absolutely. Right? When I was working on my PhD in history, I had a professor who had us write one-page analyses of articles we read. Okay.

It could not be more than one page because you know how, I mean, come on, PhD grad students are all overachievers. Yes, you're just going to write. Yeah, we all wanted to write 10 pages on everything. And she said, no, she wants, it can be, it had to be a one-inch margin all the way around. It had to be in 12-point font. Okay. It had to be single-spaced and one page. Okay.

And it teaches you, you're reading this, you know, 60-page article, and it teaches you economy. Yeah, and you got to get to what's important. Right. So take cardigan, which is a highly complex, I mean, you know, if you guys listen to our analysis, highly complex poem, wonderful song, highly complex song, and teach yourself what are the essentials by writing a three-line poem with five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables. Okay. Yeah.

Fun. Yeah. Or rewrite it in free verse or rewrite it as a limerick. What are the rules of a limerick? A limerick is a five-line poem, right, that has to be rhymed A-A-B-B-B-B-A. Okay, that's what I was trying to remember, yeah. Most limericks are comical. Okay, yeah.

Right. And the rhyme scheme is usually like the more it hurts you're the better. Yeah, it's like that nursery rhyme. type of hurting your ears that we talked about. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You could write a ballad. You know, most people get ballads like they don't understand what a ballad is. Like they say, oh, that's a beautiful ballad just because it's sweet and slow.

A ballad has a specific form. Okay. So a ballad has a four-line stanza. It has alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iymic trimeter. So eight syllables. eight syllables, six syllables, and they're rhymed, usually A, B, C, B. Ballads almost always focuses, focus on love or death. And this is what you're talking about, ballad meter.

Yes, ballad meter. Okay, yeah. Right. So Yellow Rose of Texas is ballad meter. Because he could not stop for death is ballad meter by Emily Dickinson. Yeah. Right. So there are lots of time.

One of my favorites is the Villanelle, a 19-line poem with, five tersets in a quatrain. Yeah. So there are lots in Las Sestina's, acrostic poetry, concrete poetry. Oh, we've talked about that. Yeah, concrete poem is a poem that looks like the thing it talks about. Okay, yeah. So Victor Herbert, for example, a 17th century religious poet.

I've actually visited his home and his church outside of Salisbury. Oh. But Victor Herbert liked to write concrete poems. So he writes a poem titled The Altar. Guess what it looks like? It's in the shape of an altar. Yeah, we talked about that with Cassandra, actually. Yeah.

And the lyric video, she's talking about patching up the crack along the wall. And the words are like going down the crack of the wall. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, you know, so when I said the other day and someone said, oh, that's terrible. And then somebody else said, oh, that's great.

You know, that I'd like to see her rewrite it in another form. What I was really meaning is just it would be fun to exercise our poetic chops by taking a look at it and changing it in form. And actually there are a lot of poets who do this. Okay. There are a lot of poets who do things, you know, who you'll see they have a Villanelle and a Sestina and a sonnet, all of the same poem. Okay. Or they have like a Petrarchan sonnet and then a Shakespearean sonnet and they're the same poem. And what they're doing is they're exploring, they're tinkering, they're trying to see which way do I like best, which one best expresses the ideas that I want to try to get through here.

Yeah. Okay. So why does Uncle, I put Drunkle Jerry, skeptical of confessional poetry. Okay, it's a big question. Okay, confessional poetry is one of these styles or forms of poetry. It causes discomfort because it looks at personal trauma, emotional intimacy. It can feel self-absorbing. Okay.

Like, I'm so important, here's what I think. I'm emoting to all of you. It can be uncomfortable. Yeah. it can here's the big one it can lack artistic craft oh interesting

okay so oh that yeah okay I can see that yeah so poets will write something that just where they tear open their chest and pull their heart out

and say I'm feeling this this way and then I'll read it and I'll go well but where are the good metaphors where are the interesting stymiles or turns of phrases that alter cliches or idiomatic expressions. One of the things I admire about Taylor Swift is she has all of these.

In her confessionalists. Right. If you watch any of our, any of our, you know, podcasts, you will know that we talk extensively about the poetic elements that are inherent in her confessional poetry. So one of the reasons why I do like her confessional poetry is because she's a poet. She incorporates these elements. A lot of confessional poets will not, and so they tend to lack the artistry of the craft of poetry. And when you say, why don't you rewrite this and think about using irony or think about using satire or look at the rhythmic pattern or they'll say, but this is how I feel.

Yeah. Right. I can't change how I feel. This is just how it has to be. Okay. So a part of this I'm going to tell you, it does go back to the number of confessional poets I have read. Okay. So, people.

I have been in this for a long time. And I have been a reader or helped edit a lot of different creative writing magazines. And so as a high school teacher, I started as a high school teacher, as a college teacher. I have helped read and edit thousands of poems. And most modern writers for the last 40 years like to write confessional poems. And so I have read thousands of student written confessional poems. And I will send them back and I'll say, you know, great work. I understand your emotional power here.

could you give me a literary device? Could you look at maybe making your experience relevant to a particular metaphorical phrase? Could you compare this in our last discussion? We talked about an infant's voice, a baby's voice, right? Could you compare the way you're crying out to the cry of an infant? That was beautiful, right? That's a great metaphor. And so often their response is, but this is how I feel.

I don't know. It's perfect the way I wrote it or I don't want to change it. And I'm going, but it's not. I'm telling you right now it's not. I know it's not. It's just, you know, and it's fine for them. If what they want their work, you know, if how they want their work displayed is to read it themselves or perhaps send it to family members or a significant other,

I think that's great. I think that's fine. I've asked that question before. Here's a love poem written in a confessional style that is devoid of the artistry of the craft of poetry. And I will ask, you know, you remember my example, baby, baby, I love you. This is a real poem I once received. Baby, baby, I love you from your head to your shoes. I like your face.

I like your race. No. Yes. No. Yes, it said race. No. Yeah. And so I asked him, did you show it to the person this was intent for?

He said, yes. I asked him, did she like it? She loved it. I said, then it's a successful poem. It's not going in our literary music. But it served its purpose. It did. It was a successful expression of their emotional and confessionalist ideas.

Okay. So it's not that I don't like confession. poetry, it's that I don't necessarily need to read their non-poetic therapy session. Yeah, so you have like a little bit of trauma with the confessionals. College students just like pouring their hearts out on the page that is not a poem. That is, we could have cut this way short. Yes. That is exactly it.

I have suffered trauma from having to read, baby, baby, I love you to hundreds, maybe thousands of times. The two topics students like to write about are love or the loss of it and God. And please understand, I am completely unopposed to poetry

about love and God. There are some of the greatest poems I've ever read. Yeah, because that's all there is. But, I mean, look at Taylor Swift's, Look at the diversity of topic and ideas. Yes, she writes a great deal about her love life, but there's more than that. Yeah, because it's like, yes, it's her love life, but it's like all these different aspects of it and all the different things. Lest we forget vampires.

And vampires. Vampires and ghosts and heartbreak and tarot cards. Yeah, and witches. Yes. So I appreciate her poetry. Here's what I think could be an early confess. poet. He's Ben Johnson, writing in the early 1600s. Okay. And here's a poem titled On My First Son. Son. Son. S-O-N. Okay. Yes. So what you have to know, biographically...

Wait, you we need context for this? We don't have to. We can just read it. You will understand by the end of this short poem what happened. Okay. I'll try not to cry. Oh, no. Farewell, thou child of my right hand and joy. My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy. Seven years you were lent to me, and I thee pay, exacted by fate on the just day.

Oh, could I lose all father now, for why will man lament the state he should envy to have soon escaped worlds and flesh's rage and if no other misery yet age rest in soft peace and ask say

here doth lie Ben Johnson his best piece of poetry for whose sake henceforth all his vows be such as what he loves may never like too much so yes his son died on his son's

Seventh birthday. And so he writes this what I think is a very emotional poem. Yeah, absolutely. So I do have a story around this poem. I was teaching this poem once to a group of dual credit students at 7.15 in the morning. These are high school students who attend the college. And so I read this poem aloud, and I said, so, you know, just tell me. how do you relate emotionally to a poem like this?

And this one student raised his hand. He said, so, the kid's dead, right? And I said, yes. And then he just shrugged. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old.

You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.cair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Oh, my God. Such a teen boy. So, yes, to put his reader response in context, this 17-year-old kid, that was his response.

Yeah. Now, that same afternoon, I was teaching this same poem to a class of one o'clock students. And you know who comes to the one o'clock classes are they tend to be a little bit older students. You get a lot of returning students. Okay. We don't call them older. We call them returning students. So I had this group of women, three or four women in the class who knew one another,

and they were all in their 30s. And I read through this poem, and I looked up, and one of the women stood up and said, excuse me, and she walked out of the room crying. Oh, no. And I looked at her friend, and her friend said, her daughter did. diet at age 11 of infantile leukemia. Ugh. That's read a response there.

Absolutely. Like in one day, like you got such like a specific example of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And from this wonderful you could in fact characterize it as a confessional poem, you know? I mean, he's using the eye that confessional poets write about. He's talking about his life, his son's life, this thing that happened to him.

Sorry, I mean, I'll never forget her response. I'll never forget. I mean, and like the class burst into tears. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. It's so, you know, this is a power of great poetry. You know, this is, this is, Ben Johnson's a beautiful poet.

Yeah. And, you know, but also the power of our responses. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So. That all depended on, I mean, obviously what he wrote has that emotion in it. but it had to find the right person. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, you know, confessional poetry, this is often considered to be the first great confessional poet. That's Robert Lowell, Life Studies. Probably the most famous poem in the collection is Skunk Hour, which is the very last poem. So if you're interested in reading early confessional, you know, Robert Lowell would be the guy.

So the notion, you know, it is funny to me that a lot of people associate confessionalism with women writers because they think of Emily Dickinson first. But, you know, it's interesting to me that a lot of writers are confessional. Theater Rathke was considered frequently confessional. I have a couple more examples. You know, I'd just like to share. It's so funny because both of these are about the same thing. Both of these are poets writing about their fathers.

Okay. And so this is Sylvia Plath. Okay, great, great. And this may be her most heavily anthologized poem. Ariel may be there too, but the poem Daddy. Okay. Is about her father. And you get the feeling right away, especially from her rhythm and her rhyme of how she feels about her dad.

You do not do, you do not do any more black shoe in which I have lived like a foot for 30 years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or a chew. Oh my goodness. A chew, like sneeze? But it rides with dew, which is an shoe and a chew, right? Yeah. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died, wipe him out of her mind.

Yeah. You died before I had time, marble heavy, a bag full of God, ghastly statue with one gray toe, big as a friscoe seal. Yes. She's talking about her father. In the German tongue in the Polish town, scraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars, but the name of my town is common, my Polack friend. Yeah, it goes on and on.

An engine, an engine chuffing me off like a Jew, a Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I might well be a Jew. Yes. Yes. I didn't know what's happening here. Her father was a Nazi who treated her like she was in a prison camp.

Okay, I got you now. Let me read the last two stanzas. It's a little bit long. If I've killed one man I've killed two, the vampire who said he was you, her husband. Okay, okay. And drank my blood for a year, seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you.

They're dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. So she, like, really loved her dad. Yeah, this is a confessional poetry. Oh, my God, that's so dramatic. Yeah, but the power of it is so great. The language of it is made the imagery of it, the illusion to, you know.

I mean, this is great confessional poetry. Yeah. Let me give you one from Theodore Rethke. Okay. And this is the same topic about his father. Okay. This is called My Papa's Walsz. The whiskey, and this is a little more, I'm going to say, it's a little more difficult.

It's pretty clear with Sylvia Plathoff. Yeah, very clear, yeah. The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy, but I hung on like death. Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf. My mother's countenance could not unfrown it. self. The hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle. At every step you missed my right ears scraping a buckle. You beat time on my head with a palm cake tared by dirt, then waltzed me off to

bed, still clinging to your shirt. Okay, so I've taught this to students, and I get two completely divergent ribs. Yeah, I can't tell. Is he just like a drunk guy, or, or we're We liking that he has some whiskey and takes us like down the hall to put us to bed. Right. He's either having fun on a Saturday night with his dad dancing. His dad's got him dancing around and then puts him in bed. Or there's something more. Yeah.

You know, is he talking about his father being an alcoholic? There's so much whiskey on his bread, quote, it could make a small boy dizzy. Yeah. He's not just drunk. He's past that. He hung on like death. You know, look at the addiction clues. Yeah.

Such walsing was not easy. Okay. Yeah. The kitchen pans fell from the shelf. His mother's countenance could not unfrown. Okay. His hand held his wrist. Okay.

Is this how you dance? No. No, that's pulling you. Was battered on one knuckle. Okay. There's the word battered. Yeah, that's never a good sign. At every step, my right ear scraped a buckle.

He's being beaten with a buckle with a belt. Oh, okay, okay, okay. You beat time on my head. Yeah, because that sounds like it could be like a fun, like, we're just dancing. Right. Or you're getting beaten. Yes, this is child abuse. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, this is... Interesting. Kind of confessional poetry, but I'm not. I'm going to say like Taylor Swift, it is ambiguous. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to give you just, if you'll indulge me, I'm going to give you one or two more.

Okay. Okay. Here's another confessional poet, another guy, and I really do like this. You may recognize this. May I have your attention, please. May I have your attention, please? Will the real slim, shady, please stand up. I repeat.

Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? You're going to have a problem here. Y'all act like you've never seen a white person before. Jaws all on the floor like Pam, like Tammy. Tommy, excuse me. I know everywhere. She's just burst in the door and started whooping her ass worse than before. They first were divorced, throwing her over furniture.

Ah! Yeah, feminist women love Eminem. Chica, chic-cheek-a-cheek-Slim shady. I'm sick of him. Walking around, grabbing his you know what Yeah. You know who. Yeah, but he's so cute though.

You're so cute though. I know. You know, when... When you printed out the lyrics to some shady. I did. I... And it's three pages long. I mean, if you read through these,

it is absolutely fascinating stuff. When I first heard Eminem, I have to tell you, I was totally enraper. I just love the guy. Same. And I was like 12. Oh, that's so sad. I was only slightly older. Yeah, just a little.

Yeah. I was still in my new criticism phase. No, but so it's so fascinating because he talks about assuming persona, you know. You know, who am I? Am I, am I my real name? What's his real name? Marshall Mathers. Marshall Mathers

Am I Marshall Mathers? Am I M&M? Am I Slim Shady? Am I somebody the record company is trying to make me? Right? Because that's in this poem. And you know who else has trouble with record companies? I do, yeah. I know a girl.

Yeah. And who they want her to be. No, you can't do that. You're a country Western artist. No, you can't do that. It's too personal. Or no, you can't have your first six albums back. Yeah. I know. It's about all those things. It's about

other singers, other rappers, other writers. Yeah. And if you look through here and look at the number of illusions, look at the use of metaphor and simile, this is really good stuff. And the overarching theme of who am I as an artist, is my name Mathers

or Eminem or Slim Shady or whoever else the record company wants me to be this week? You know, who am I? Interesting. Yeah, it's really fascinating stuff, and I'm just going to say... Yeah, because that's one where he talks about, like, Christina and Brittany and... Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so... He's, like, talking about all the people, yeah. I mean, if you want to see a lot of great poetry, it's out there. I do have one more book to show you, and this is actually by someone I really like. This is Dana Joya. It's Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture.

And we brought Dana Joya to our campus once. He's published a couple of books of poetry. I like them very much. They're very nice. Some of them are confessional, but always really, really good. One reason why I have to like him is he inscribed the book to me. Yeah. And we both play bass clarinet in high school.

So Dana and I shared. We had a great evening. together. Actually, I showed him around campus and he did his poetry reading and then he met with some classes and then my job was to take him out to dinner. And so we sat there drinking Japanese beer and talking about life and poetry and stuff. How fun. And this is a really fun book. It's a series of essays in which he asks that question. Does poetry really matter to us anymore? You know, I think it matters to Taylor Swift. I think she not only says it matters

and she puts it in titles of her albums, but I think she demonstrates that it matters because she uses the techniques of a good poet. So I'm grateful for that. I'm happy that you've introduced me to her work. Yeah, it feels important because I feel like a lot of people think of poetry as a thing you learn

in English class and it's from the 1800s, you know, and it's not relevant now, and it doesn't matter in our world that we have now, you know? Right. But whenever artists, like Eminem or, like, I don't think anybody's sitting down to talk about Eminem as poetry, but obviously they could, you know. Absolutely. And, like, we are doing this with this most popular, you know, pop star, the biggest pop star in the world and we're breaking it down in a way that says like this is just poetry this is not pop

music this is not anything other than it's just poetry right and it does matter it does matter you know um one of the songs i thought about talking about one of the poems i thought about talking about joan bias's poem you know i've looked at life from both sides now um do you know that song Wait, that's, that's, that's not Joan Bias. Is it not? No, that's Joni Mitchell. Joni Mitchell. Are you sure?

I'm not sure. I thought, oh yeah, both sides now. Joni Mitchell, I ran it off. Look at me, knowing stuff. You know, yeah, rose and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air and feather canyons everywhere looked at clouds that way. Yeah, because I've seen the cloud, like I've seen it from the top of the clouds and under the clouds. I don't know why I said Joan Baez. But now they only block the sun.

They rain and they snow on everyone. So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way. It's a confessionist poetry. But look at the poetic elements, the flows of angel hair, the ice cream castles. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, it's stunning the way we look at clouds and we see these things. and when do clouds

create and when do clouds obscure? You know, moons and junes and ferris wheels the dizzy dancing way, dizzy dancing, nice alliteration. That is, yeah. Right? Sounds like Taylor Swift. Way that you feel as every fairy tale comes real. And who also writes about fairy tales?

A little Taylor Swift. I know. I mean, I think there's a lot of great poetry out there of all kinds. And it's hard that sometimes poetry doesn't matter. You know, Dana Joya talks, asked the question in one of his chapters, what happened to the long poem? You know, people used to read epics.

You know, they used to sit down and read books of poetry. And now those are very hard cells. At Volvo, safety is not a feature. It's our purpose. rigorous crash testing, decades of learning from real accidents, innovations that help prevent accidents before they happen, and help protect you when they occur. Going above and beyond industry standards,

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And it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Yeah, I, speaking of poetry and books of poetry, I follow a couple of, I don't want to call them Instagram poets, but like that's kind of what they're. are. It's like to get that kind of, to get that kind of book published, you have to now have a following. And so those people start writing poetry on Instagram and then they get poem or get, you know, an audience and then a book publisher will come along and be like, okay, well, we know you can sell some of these, you know, because it's all about how many are going to sell.

And I have a couple of those. And I have a girl that I talk to, a woman that I talk to all the time. We've been like internet friends for a while. And she's working. on her second book of poetry right now, published. And it's very fun, like, kind of free verse, you know. The first one was called A Bit Much. Lindsay Rush is her name, because she wrote this poem that went mega-viral about women being a bit much, you know? Like, that's how people are, women are described a lot, you know? And the next one is called, she just announced it, it's called microdosing hope.

And it's just like there's fun, like, I don't know, I think it absolutely does matter. And I feel like it's come back a little bit, but agreed. Like, nobody's reading like an Iliad now, you know. Yeah, you know, it's funny because the very first book of the month club, a book was Tristram by Edwin Arlington Robinson, E.A. Robinson. And it sold a million copies in a month. And it was a book-length poem. It's an epic.

When was this? 1927, 99 years ago. A million copies. A million copies. That's crazy. But we don't do that, you know. But you're right. I think that there may be a revival.

You know, we have a lot of young poets, one of whom was featured in an inauguration. Yeah, yeah, I love her. But I do too. I can't think of her name right at the top of my head. But a lot of great young poets, a lot of great writers. Gorman. Gorman is her last name. A lot of them online, as you said.

Uh-huh. Yeah. But it's, yeah, I hope it's coming back. I think today, instead of reading a book of poetry, you buy a Taylor Swift album. and you listen. Yeah, maybe so. And I'm, you know, I'm not going to say that's an inappropriate response. I think, you know, a lot of her songs are appropriate poetry. Yeah.

This has been fun. I like talking about, so thank you folks who both compliment it or questioned. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's such an interesting conversation because I think it comes down to, there are a thousand school of thoughts on poetry and the different types. types of poetry and we're all going to have preferences. Right. And some people have a lot of data to back up the preferences and some people are just like,

I like it. Yeah, you know, that's one of the things I always used to say to students when they gave me an interpretation, I always said, and where is that in the poem? You know, like it has to be, it has to be somewhere in the work, not just in your heart or in your head. You've got to be able to find it. Right. And, you know, but I'm not going to depreciate the value of using either your heart or your head. Okay, yeah, yeah.

This has been really fun. Yeah, I feel like we need to have more conversations like this. Like, I feel like we still need to get into, like, muses a little bit, you know, and I feel like there's more that we can talk about here. Yeah, I think, like, the more I think about reapplying critical approaches that I don't usually touch on, things like Marxist criticism, you know, even. even as I was explaining it. Like ideas came to your mind.

I kept thinking, oh man, I'm gesturing with the pipe mill. Yeah, ideas kept coming in. I was thinking, wow, we could use that song or that song or maybe that song. You know, champagne problems. Yeah, a couple came to my head, too, like that we haven't talked about instantly. And I've never, I've been heard of that. So we could, yeah, reapply this idea of class and economic criticism to solve her poetry. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Done? For now, anyway? Yes. Okay, hope you all enjoyed this, something a little different, and we'll be back out of soon with another song.

Yes. Okay. Bye.