The Swiftie and The Scholar - Wrapping Up Folklore: Part 1

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Well, guys, we’ve really stressed Uncle Jerry out with this one. He went so deep on the folklore album as a whole that this episode focuses mostly on the prologue and how it sets up this new style of storytelling, different from all her previous albums. Hope you enjoy, and we’ll see you back here next week for Part 2!*Links with an asterisk are affiliate links, which allow us to make a small commission on your purchase at no cost to you. Thanks so much for your support!Works Cited:*Starship Troopers – Robert A. Heinlein Folklore (Taylor Swift album)*Shakespeare's Sonnets & Poems – William Shakespeare*Sonnets from the Portuguese – Elizabeth Barrett Browning*Astrophil and Stella – Sir Philip Sidney SemioticsThe Odyssey – HomerBeowulfDryadsHulderFolklore prologueDaddy – Sylvia PlathAnecdote of the Jar – Wallace StevensThe Swiftie and The Scholar Grading MatrixFollow Us:Patreon⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠Reddit⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠Threads⁠Angela’s Instagram⁠Uncle Jerry’s InstagramAngela’s YouTube Channel

Mmm, baby. Diet Coke. Non-caffeinated Diet Coke. That means you're just in it for the love of the game, you know? That's right. You're not drinking caffeine. You know, this is me trying. Okay. Are we ready? I'm ready. Welcome to the Swiftie and the Scholar, the podcast where we examine the lyrics, lore, and literary legacy of Taylor Swift.

I am Angela McDowell the Swifty. I am the mystical magical Dr. Jerry Coates. The scholar. The scholar. How are you doing, Uncle Jerry? I have stressed you out, I think. You have stressed me out, but I am persevering. Okay, you persist and resist.

It's what I do. Temptation to quit. Hey, you know, like I said, this is me trying. Oh my gosh. Okay. So we are here at the end. of folklore, wrapping folklore up. Shed a tear.

But the tears will ricochet. Oh my gosh, he knows it all now, y'all. It's crazy. Okay, so today, I think this is going to be a couple-parter, it seems like we're going to do. Officially a couple-parter. A couple-parter. Uncle Jerry has dug into the lyrics, the album, the prologue that Taylor, you know,

includes with every album. the actual vinals and the colors and all the things. So I think we're going, I'm going to let you tell us, but I think we're starting with like unpacking prolog and things and then maybe we'll move on to the album. Yes, okay. Yeah, that sounds great. Okay.

Yes, I'm going to reveal it all to you. Okay, okay. Actually, that's a complete lie. He knows it all. He's got it all down. He hasn't been stressed for two weeks about this. That's right. Well, you know, the deal with.

The deal with going to school, which I have done for a long time, you know, and so the deal with having like multiple classes and degrees is that the old axiom, the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. You know, because like it's every class I took, every book I read, I find out something and I go, oh, I need to know more about that, right? So, I mean, recently, I think I mentioned a few months ago that I reread Nicholas Nickleby. And this is my third time around with Nicholas Nickleby. But the first time I was in a class and reading it.

And the second time I was teaching it. And so I was kind of pressed for time. And this time I took like two months to read it. And it was so wonderful to kind of luxuriate through the book. Yeah. And I just having to do it for like a school or something. Well, and I looked up every single thing. It's like, you know, he goes up to York and stays at a particular inn.

I looked up the end. Is it still there? Is it? It is. Are you going there? Yeah, I mean, it sounds fun, right? We were in York last year, so. That's right.

Yeah, but we're going to Cornwall next month, so, yeah. But, you know, it's so, I mean, the world is so large. It's, no one can know everything. That's my preface to the preface to say that. that, you know, I'm just, I'm going to say a few things that I know. And y'all can fill in some stuff that you know. And you guys, yes, play the game and, yeah, fill it in. So, yeah, I started, I started when we said we were going to do the whole album.

You know, what I did was I went back through and I ran off all the songs. So, you know, I got all the songs and all the episodes. I started, you know, I didn't want to look at my old notes. I wanted to see something fresh. Okay, yeah, yeah. So I started going through, and it's amazing the stuff you discover the next time around. Yeah. Right.

I mean, you know, as I've said before, you know, some books, I've read multiple times, and every time you come back to a book, you know, you're a different person. Uh-huh, yeah, something new, like, eliminates for you, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think I told the story of reading Starship Troopers when I was in, like, seventh grade and I thought it was the best book ever. I didn't know that was a book. Yeah, yeah, and by Robert Heinlein. And I've read every single book Heinlein wrote.

And, you know, I mean, I love science fiction. So, yeah, I read everything. And that was one of my favorites. That one, a citizen of the galaxy, I think, and have a space suit will travel. And prod came to March. I don't know. I don't know.

This is like me talking about my favorite Taylor album. Yeah, I know. It's like, and of course, Stranger. Strangeland and how can you get away without time enough for love. Yeah, but okay, so, you know, when the movie Starship Troopers came out, I reread it and I thought, you know, this is the greatest book ever. No, it's like an adolescent book that's, I mean, kind of puerile from time to time. And I just was, I mean, it's like I was slogging through it thinking,

Ouch. Well, I'm a different person, right? Yeah, you're a grown up now. You've a lot of experience behind you. Right. I'm a different kind of reader. And so I'm sure that happens with this, you know. I have to admit I did not listen to the whole album. Okay. So more to come for there maybe later down the road. Yeah, I mean, you know, I didn't re-listen to the songs. What I did was I reread the as poems. And so I reread the seven. 17 poems as a collection.

And I kept, I kept thinking, okay, should I reread just 16 poems or the 17 poems? Because one was, the lakes kind of added at the end. Right. And I do question that. I mean, I do question the value of adding that. I mean, I think that's more for her. I wonder about it, you know, whether it's more for her, you know, to put a kind of CODA on the work. And how does it resonate with the other poems?

But more on that later. Okay. Did I just say moron? Who are you talking to? I don't know. Before you get into this, I want to talk a little bit about like the commercial success of folklore. Okay, great. How it was like, you know, she surprised dropped it.

She told us on a Thursday morning and it came out Thursday night. Right. Billboard, Rolling Stone, and Time all ranked it as the best album of 2020. Okay. The album top. the Billboard 200 charts for eight weeks. So it was number one for eight weeks. And that was the longest charting album of 2020. It also was the bestselling album of 2020 and the eighth best selling album of 2021. So that was like, you know, 2021 finished 18 months after it came out and it was

still the eighth best selling of that year. Are you trying to like influence or intimidate me? Not at all. Just to just give a little bit more context. On the first day of release, folklore broke global streaming records on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. It sold over 1.3 million units worldwide on its first day. That's decent. And 2 million units in its first week, which just like doesn't happen anymore except for for Taylor. And then I just want to talk about a little bit about how people were describing it at the time. The Guardian said that folklore was a respite from chaotic events.

The Daily Telegraph called it an exquisite, empathetic lockdown triumph. NME wrote that the album will be remembered as the quintessential lockdown album that felt like the perfect accompaniment for the weird loneliness of 2020, which I completely agree with. Insider said that folklore would be known as lockdown's one true map. masterpiece. Rolling Stone said it may go down in history as the definitive quarantine album for providing comfort and catharsis just when we needed it the most. Billboard said that it would be cherished as one of Swift's most influential albums. Uprocks noted how folklore changed the tone of music in 2020. Uprocks said that. You know, that incredible media outlet Uprocks. Yeah. It changed the tone of music in 2020 and its impact on the year's cultural landscape can't be measured.

Vulture said folklore was 2020's best breakdown in musical form for addressing topics of loneliness. I mean, this just goes on and on. First Great Pandemic Art, the first great lockdown album, the first great album of the lockdown era. So it was just like, it just came in and like kind of completely changed things for Taylor and put her in. I mean, obviously she's a huge star already, but like I think this brought in a new audience. Yeah, I think it's decent. Yeah. But yeah, I just want to talk about that a little bit. because, I mean, it really did have, like, it had such a moment.

Right. Yeah. So when I got up this morning, still working on this stuff. You know, I told Leslie my wife, this is really different, you know, it's really a departure from what she has done in the past. And it's really, you know, I, so people write collections of poetry, right? And I'm not talking about Shakespeare's 154, but, you know, certainly EBBB, Elizabeth Barrett Brownings, Sonnas of the Portuguese. You know, there are lots of collections of poetry that are narrative. Sir Philip Sidney wrote this long sonnet sequence called The Astrophel and Stella.

Okay. Which is kind of wonderful. It's about these two people, one named Astrofell, one named Stella. So Stella is Latin for star and Astrofell is Greek for star lover, right? Okay, cute. So, yeah, the one star and star lover. He's like trying to woo her and trying to understand how to. And it talks about their romance.

So each one, you know, poem resonates with the other. So people have done that in the past. Certainly, you know, this does some of that. Yeah. But it's, it's kind of special because it's, it's also songs. Right. You know? Yeah.

And so I think sometimes when you hear the music, you, maybe you lose or you, you, um, don't retain the idea that it's also literature. Uh-huh. Absolutely. Yeah. So that's what I want to talk about. Okay. Yeah. Let's go for it.

So I started running off all these songs. Okay. And I started reviewing them. And I started making, like I opened up a word page and I started just typing all the song titles and then writing a synopsis of the song and writing, you know, imagery and symbols and metaphors and common literary devices and the narrator and the voice and that kind of thing just in shorthand so that I could do a quick three-page comparative of all 17. And, you know, immediately I start noticing things I didn't say. Okay. And it's like, well, dang, I didn't say that about that. Oh, look, there's something else, you know.

And I even called you about what, like the one, you know. You know, about every one of these you question, why is it in folklore, right? Well, there's a folklore or folktale trope that there's only one true love for you. Right. Right. And so this is the one, right? It's the one that's going to put on the glass slipper. You know, you find the one that fits the glass slipper.

slipper or the one who's going to kiss Sleeping Beauty and wake her up, you know, the one who's going to see that Rapunzel's up in that. Yeah, save you from the tower. Very long, cylindrical shaped, erect tower. And, yeah, I mean, and I thought, oh, yeah, you know, I didn't really talk about that and make that connection to folklore and folk tales. And, I mean, there were just, there were several of those things. And I kept going, oh, that's pretty cool.

Oh, I should have mentioned that. You know, it's kind of like reading the comments after we drop one of our episodes. You can't say everything. No, never. Yeah. So, okay, and then as I was working out, you sent me this, the prologue. Yes. Okay.

And then I started thinking, well, this is really interesting. I should do something with the prologue and treat it like, you know, a piece of prose literature and sort of take it apart. And then I looked at all, you sent me this, which is all the album covers. Yeah, all the different variants and the names of them that are taken from lyrics. Yeah, because I opened this up and had these nice like lavender color discs. And I started looking at the pictures and I said, I'd like to talk about the pictures. But they're also on the slip covers and you sent me this and it has the whole phoenix.

Roto Array. Yeah. So let's start with this. Okay. When you think about semiotics, the art of understanding signs. Okay. Okay. And when you think about visual rhetoric, you know, that pictures tell stories, and everybody

says they're worth a thousand words. So what stories do the pictures tell? I mean, what's common about all eight of these images? They're black and white. Black and white. They're outdoors. in like a forest or woods or something. They're outdoors.

They all have tailor in them. They all have tailors. So they're all, you know, how many other people do you see in them? Zero people. Zero people. Yeah, even when you open up this album and you have this image of her indoors. It's still about the floral or the leaves. Yeah, you can still see leaves.

So it still looks like she is surrounded by nature. You know, and this one she's like completely immersed. That's Betty's Garden cover. Yeah. She's completely immersed. So it makes her look like she is a part of nature. And so I started thinking, oh, you know, there are lots of figures who are in nature. You know, there are witches in nature.

There's the Angel and Gretel witch who lives in the woods. You know, the musical end of the woods. So woods are in folklore and in folk literature. Woods tend to be places of wildness. places away from civilization, sometimes places of nature. So it depends upon, sometimes it depends upon the time frame, you know. In early literature, frequently nature is seen as a killer, you know, it's monstrous. Okay.

I mean, it consumes us. I mean, think about Odysseus's return from the war. He runs into Scylla and Sherebdis. Well, those are all natural phenomena. They're earthquakes and their great whirlpools. Okay, that makes sense. Right. And so they're killers, they're devourers, and they're characterized in The Odyssey as monsters. You see the same thing in, for example, Beowulf, you know.

When Beowulf goes into nature, when he follows the trail of Grendel's bloody arm, he has to go through snakes and serpents and fire and horrible woods with poisonous things. So nature's a devouring killer, you know. When you read the romantic poets, oh, no, no. You know, we've tamed nature. Now it's beautiful. It's a retreat. It's, yeah, yeah, yeah, move away from civilization. You know, I kept thinking that she looks like a dryad, you know, from Greek mythology or Greek religion.

Yeah. Dryad is a nymph. Okay. It comes from the Greek word drice, which means oak. So, yeah. So they usually associated with some specific type of tree. Gotcha. Yeah, so some of them are associated with a laurel, some of them with an oak, that kind of thing.

Gotcha. And, I mean, they're goddesses of nature. You know, in antiquity we looked at nature. I mean, how often have you been on a mountain top or, you know, you guys went into the mountains after you got married in New York? And you look at the mountains and you say, oh, surely there's something magical here. There's a supernatural entity. You know, God is in the mountain. Absolutely, yeah.

Right. Yeah, it's unlike anything else. Yeah, we did this, there's an archetype, right? We did this in antiquity. Okay. So we looked at trees, we looked at mountains and forests, and we thought there must be a god there. Okay, yeah.

Right. And so here she is. She's almost like the goddess of the forest. She is Mother Nature. I put she's an enchantress. Like that. Yeah, I mean, it kind of contrasts. I like some of the pictures because she's looking down, others, she's looking up.

You know, she's exhibiting vulnerability. She's also exhibiting a kind of supernatural power sometimes when she's looking up, you know. Yeah, this one she looks like large. Yeah, and this one, the shots from below, which is, you know, a frequent camera trick. You see it in movies all the time. When someone wants to be powerful, they, you know, they're always shot from the ground up. You know, and so she has a sort of witchy power. Yeah.

You know, the supernatural power. And she shifts from like a lost traveler to a kind of ghostly apparition. Yeah, to a kind of guardian of the wilderness. Okay. And I love the one where she's just sitting in the grass and just looking down. Me too. Yeah. You know, I love that.

I mean, there are all kinds of different. I didn't mention Hulah, who's a four. goddess in Scandinavian literature. Okay, I was going to see that. Sounds like Danish or something. Yeah, they always sound like the Swedish chef. Do you do, do, do. Come on now.

I'm like one-quarter Danish. Yeah, I love the imagery. I love the rhetoric of these images, you know, what she's trying to say. And it's very wistful. It also casts us backward away from civilization. and I think that's what folklore does. Yeah. You know.

So in it, she gives us this prologue, this preface to the work. So where is this? Because I looked at it in your album and it wasn't there. I guess this must have just been what she shared on social to, like, say, here's my album. So I think it must have just been put as an image onto, like, Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and stuff. it was in there, but I was mistaken. This just must have been like, here have my album. So this is my first time looking at her prose.

Yes. And, I mean, the first thing that the overall comment I would make is it's really interesting how her prose, how the prologue here reflects what's going to be in the album in terms of stylistics. Okay. Right. I mean, she begins with it started with imagery. Well, it's a general reference problem. We talk about that all the time.

We do. Yeah, she frequently starts a poem with It or These or They or Those. And there's no noun aniseedon. Yeah. Right. So she immediately throws the window wide open and says, come and play my game and try to figure out what is it. She's talking about the It starts with imagery. Okay, it, the individual poem, an individual song, the whole album, the images we see.

The idea of the album. Right. So, you know, it's kind of fun. She uses sentence fragments, which we frequently see. She uses anaphora, that repetition, normally at the first line, but, you know, here she uses the repetition in the second paragraph. I've never met people I've known or those I wish I hadn't. So I, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

She uses allusion. She mentions Guadalcanal or the High Line. She uses interesting diction. She says a tale becomes folklore. Is one that is passed down. Now she could stop there. It's one that's passed down. But she says, and whispered around.

Oh, that's nice. Right? So, yeah. Why whispered? Why not spoken? Why not, you know, told around fire camps? No, she says whispered. So it's kind of, she says in the next lines,

it blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Yeah. So that's whispering. Yeah, and it's kind of like almost gossipy, you know, where you have to be, like, secretive about what you're saying. Yeah, so, I mean, she uses the same kind of diction, literary devices, syntax that we're going to see in the songs.

Yeah. So essentially the preface prefaces not just the material, but it prefaces the stylistics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so what about this prolog? So I, you know, I said in my comments here that the prologue functions more like a poetic statement than an introduction to an album. Okay. Okay. So when, I mean, think about the romantics. And remember that when Wordsworth and Coleridge published the lyrical ballads, not all of which are ballads, but.

When they published their collection of poetry at the end of the 18th century, they had a very important preface to it. And they sort of make an announcement, and I've talked about this before, they make an announcement what poetry, what new poetry ought to be. It ought to be centered in nature. It ought to be centered in the individual human being. It ought to be turned back towards God or the spiritual or the supernatural. It ought to be poised in natural language, in the language of common people.

Yes, yes, yes. You know, and I always say, I always told students, nobody ever blows a trumpet and makes an announcement. It is now time to write neoclassical literature, you know. But in fact, that's an announcement, right? At the end of the 18th century, Wordsworth and Coleridge make an announcement. They say, we want a new type of literature. We want romantic literature, and they define it, you know. I think she's doing that in this preface.

Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah, because this, because, well, sorry to cut you off, but, like, that makes sense because she kind of had to tell us, like, hey, guys, this is completely different than anything I've done before. Right. Yeah. So she had to, like, say, like, I'm doing something different here.

Here's how you need to, like, take in these stories, basically. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because authors do that from time to time, right? They will shift gears, you know, and they'll try something new. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. You know, Steinbeck liked to write about life in California in the 1930s. You know, he writes Tarlingual Flats and Grapes of Wrath.

And then he tried Pippin, this historical fiction about a king named Pippin. Totally different. Yeah. I've got that on my shelf around here. It's a first edition. Of course it is. With the original slip cover. Aha.

You know, and the question is, oh, how does that going to work for you, dude? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so she's kind of making an announcement. She's saying, not just introducing the album, but she's saying this is going to be something different. I need you readers to consider functions other than listening to the work alone. I need you to consider it as much.

more than just music exclusively. I mean, she literally gives you a list of ways to consider her work. Yeah. And it has to be done not just by listening, but I think by reading as well. She asks us to consider the relationship between truth and fiction. You know, she says some of these are going to be true, and we're going to put air quotes. And some of these are going to be fiction. And she's going to blur those lines.

And she asks you to think about what's the role. of the songwriter as storyteller. Okay. So, you know, she poses herself more as a storyteller with stories to give. So this work is, I think, and based on my limited understanding, you know, of her works to date, it's a departure from previous works. For sure. You know, her previous works tended towards the autobiographical. They tended toward confessional poetry.

Okay. And, you know, I've said sometimes for me, confessional works. Sometimes it doesn't. It depends on how the writer engages me as a reader. Right. Right. If that reader's window is open a little, if I can say, oh, yes, I've experienced that, these works do not do that.

Okay. Okay. I mean, think about confessionalism. You know, is there a confessional poem in this group? I mean, she slips. She's, because she's blurring truth and fiction and herself in with these characters that she's created, it's like maybe there is a tiny bit, but only insofar as, like, putting an actual, like, maybe human element in it, and then we can all be those characters, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, you know, she gives us her grandfather on Guadalcanal, which is true. Yeah. And she, you know, she gives us that as a kind of confessional. This is a part of my lived experience. But then she also gives us the nurse in a COVID ward or the caretaker in a COVID ward. And, you know, that's a fictional creation. Right. And she mixes them together.

So they're both in the pot and she's stirring as the storyteller. So it's a departure. It's not purely confessional. These works tend toward character studies. They tend toward those vignettes. And they even look like short stories sometimes. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So items of note in the prologue. First of all, the prologue begins with images, not stories. Right? The very first line... Yeah, she says it began with imagery. Yeah, the very first line. It started with imagery.

Okay, this is something she's very good at. Okay, yes. Yes, yes. Right? We've talked about that. You know, average riders, mediocre writers say, you know, we walked out into the hot day, you know, but she doesn't do that. She gives us imagery, you know, that slants towards our understanding and feeling of her. the heat and the moisture on our face and the smell of, you know, the hot grass.

Yeah, and the hot concrete or something. Right. She doesn't forget to attack all five of our senses. So she's very good at imagery and this, she says, this album begins with imagery. She says the prologue, it started with imagery and then she uses that general reference pronoun. You know, what is it? This is one of her tricks.

Yeah. Okay. It is the album. It is the concept. It is the song. It is this new era. Oh, now I'm using... Look at you using the terminology.

I'm using the language of swiftology. Okay. So, again, the window for the reader is wide open here. Yeah. Right. It's like just a big double door, really. Right. Yeah, you go open up a window.

those French stores and said, come on in. The party is going. So, yeah, and the statement is remarkably simple. It is an iceberg. Right, using that Hemingway-esque terminology. It is a technique that we know she uses

elsewhere. Yeah. So, yeah, she reflects the technique we're going to see in the poems in the prologue. Okay, note what it doesn't say her writing begins with. It does not begin with contemporary events.

It doesn't begin with a relationship. It doesn't begin with memories, right? It doesn't begin with the melodies. You know, so often in the, I'm going to go ahead and just say long pond sessions. So often in the long pond sessions, we've heard Jack Antonov. Okay, good. Jack Antenov say things like, you know, I sent you the, the melody, you know, and she'll acknowledge she got the music and she started working on lyrics,

you know, and sometimes it'll be the opposite way. Yeah, it just depends, yeah. Right, it just depends, you know, but in one of the recent ones you played for me, he, you know, says, I sent it to you and she said, yeah, when I got the music, I immediately started thinking. Yeah, she's like, and this turned into this, and I saw the whole story in my head. Yeah. Yeah. But she doesn't say it begins like that.

She says it begins with imagery, you know, and she says it doesn't. it doesn't begin with autobiography. It doesn't begin with my experience. It begins with an image in her head. So, you know, this distinct opening kind of indicates a crucial factor in the nature of her poetry. That's what we're going to see. We're going to see images. So essentially for her, you know, her confessional poetry works another way. Her confessional poetry begins with her experience. and then she translates that into an emotion and then she translates that into a poem filled with images.

Right, right, right, right. So it's like backwards, basically. Right, yeah. See, she's got a different sequence in mind for this particular album. Interesting, yeah. Right? She's got, she starts with the image and that's going to go into imaginative investigation. Right?

She uses the word curiosity. So she begins with an image and then she goes to, investigate, I'm going to investigate that image. I'm going to be curious about that image. And then I'm going to associate a character with that image. And then I'm going to create a story. And then by handing it over to you, it will become folklore. Right. So the methodology is quite different from the methodology employed in her confessional poetry. And all that is laid out for us in the prologue. So we need to know that. And we need to think about it. When you analyze the poem, when I went back and started re-analyzing these poems, I thought,

oh, so her methodology is the image, becomes the character, creates the story. And then, in what way does she hand it off to me? You know, like, what am I to do with this story? You know, what am I to do with the Great American Dynasty? You know, I don't know in the house. Yeah. And I did read a biography of Rebecca Harkness, as you know. You know, but I didn't know her, and I don't know Taylor Swift. What do I do with it, you know? And I think that becomes apparent as we go into the poems. Interesting.

Okay. Second big comment. Yes. Other than this really interesting new methodology she's going to employ, the prologue establishes imagery as a system of symbols. Okay. Because in that first paragraph, she immediately goes on to make a list. Okay, you know, she lists cardigan, battleships, tree swing, August, disco ball, right?

She just starts making a list of the images that came to her head. And then you get to play the game that she played in because you think, okay, stars and scars, that's the image. Okay, stars are light, scars are pain, so light surrounds the pain. stars are beautiful scars are healing so beauty surrounds the healing right well yeah I mean so you just start thinking

then what does the image represent symbolically how do you establish meaning right so the stars are transcendent the meaning the scars are injury so we have to transcend our You know, as we assess it.

Battleships, conflict, defeat, they go down, right? Emotional warfare. Yeah. So they become symbols. Tree swing equals innocence of childhood, memory, ups and downs. Yeah. The ups and downs of life. It's also a sexual image.

I mean, let's not forget, right? August, I think, pivotal moments. You know, it's a pivotal moment of the year. It's when after August it begins turning cool, although here in Texas. Not yet. I know. We had 100 yesterday, so, you know, it's like, what? Any day now, though.

I know. It's almost here. Yeah, but, you know, August heat gives way to cooling, you know, and think about how symbolically that reaches so many things in our life, you know, the heat of early love, of new love gives way to cooling, you know, I hope not. I hope it matriculates into something that is long-lasting. Right, right. And everlasting warmth.

But, you know, you think about what August means symbolically. The disco ball, performance, reflection, multi-sided, fragmentation, you know, light, redirected, you know, like her career, like her life, like our lives in COVID, redirected. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. She mentioned whiskey, escape, temptation, indulgence, self-destruction. What's cool about the prologue is she gives us a preview of all these images, and she just dares us. She's testing us.

You know, what could you associate symbolically with plastic, right? Artificiality, impermanence, pandan. pandemic isolation, you know, the clothing, the plus. What could you associate with a thread, you know, destiny, connection, continuity, community, you know, she gives us that list of images and then she plays the game. I'm going to think about those images, you know. What makes the prologue important is that she doesn't immediately explain the connections between the image and the meaning.

Right, right. She lets us. She lets us. And she does it in her poetry, but sometimes she doesn't explicitly do it in the poetry. Right. This is the open window for the reader. So she introduces it, she tells us again,

but it's up to us to understand. The image is offered her an opportunity to engage us in the act of discovery. Right. Right. So we're going to discover what all this means, you know, as we go through. And like I said, I'll tell you what it all means. The definitive answer. Okay. Next step. Yes. The images become characters. Yeah. Okay. So the very first sentence of the long paragraph, you know, becomes the central artistic moment. She says, pretty soon these images in my head grew faces or names and became, became. characters. I find myself not only writing my own stories, doing that confessional thing, but also writing about are from the perspective of the people I've never met, people I've

known, or those I wish I hadn't. You're going to use Scooter Brown. Yeah. Maybe, but... Yeah, I love that. So the image grows into a character, the character goes into a story. So this helps us explain why so many of her stories, so many of her stories, so many of poems, Cardigan, August Betty, the last great American dynasty, exile, they're all dramatically

different from her straightforward autobiographical stuff. For sure. You know, that she writes in, very successfully in her earlier works. You know, she explicitly states that she's writing my own stories, right? However,

she's also, quote, writing about her from the perspective of people I've never met. Okay, so she's writing about herself, she's writing about people she doesn't know are people she's made up. Okay. So why is that folklore? Well, because, you know, she gets to play in this imaginative world of the character

development. But we get to play in the imaginative world of the character development. I mean, how many Reddit strings are devoted to, you know, who is Betty, who is August, who is? And they even gave August a name Augustine, which, appears like nowhere in the poem. So, you know, she's constantly inviting us to engage.

And it's something that I think that she does really, really well. Yeah, agreed. You know, and it transcends what she does in her confessional poetry. You know, I think there are several questions that we, as the reader, have to answer. And I made a list. Okay. Okay.

How successfully does she accomplish this? Okay. Right? I mean, she's trying to make characters out of images, and she's trying to make stories, and she's trying to engage us. And one of our first questions is, does it work? Uh-huh. Okay.

The second question is, in what ways does it matter? Okay. Right? She tells stories, but, you know, how does that story matter to me? You know, I was helping Oliver with his homework last night, And one of his things is he's got to write an essay about this short story he read. And I read the short story. And it's about a seventh grader going to a new school.

Oh, okay. Oliver's a seventh grader. You know, and I thought how amazingly relevant, you know, to his life, that first day of school experience. Absolutely, yeah. You know. And so, yeah, it doesn't matter to us. Does it forward her poetic art? She's doing a new thing.

you know, is this new thing something that stretches her, makes her grow, gives her muscles? Yeah, a new tool in her tool belt. Yeah, and having read some of the poems from the tortured poets, I think it does. I agree, yeah. You know, it's like, I think those later poems are better than earlier poems. Yeah, absolutely. It totally, like, expanded her toolbox, I guess. and like allowed her to then do some of this on on other albums that are super like the tortured poets department is incredibly autobiographical and incredibly confessional but she's still throwing in you know cassandra right and peter pan and you know beautifully yeah she's still like throwing in all of these you know the monstrous femininity that we talked about in like who's afraid of little old me like she's using all of that still yeah that's you know

that's what I love about Peter is, is I understand it's autobiographical, I understand it's confessional, but I also realize you can read it entirely without the name Taylor Swift. Absolutely. Applied to it, right? Yeah. Yeah. That I could be the person aging out of Peter Pan, you know. I could be flying a different direction than Peter Pan.

So, yeah, I think that it gives her muscles, you know, and that that doesn't. always happen. You know, when I say the later stuff is better than the earlier stuff, that's not always true of every writer. Right. You know, I did mention Wordsworth, where, you know, my, my personal assessment is that his earlier stuff tends to be better than his later stuff. That's interesting. Yeah. People don't tend to read the poetry from the 1840s, but they do read that stuff from the late 18th century, the late 1700s, and the stuff that runs through, 1810 or 20. Okay, interesting, yeah.

Yeah. So I think he matures as a poet, but he loses some of that romantic authenticity. Yeah. You know, that's just Jerry. And we could now break and I'll bring in some poems and show them to you. Tell us about it. Yeah. But, yeah, I think that it stretches her muscles, you know.

And then do we like it? Right? Because people have grown used to, and I know so many Swifties grow used to the confessional style. And when I first mentioned that I questioned confessionalism, right, a lot of you wrote back. Yeah. What is he talking about? But you saw the clip of her even saying, like, you know, you can't just like say insane things about yourself. Right.

And it be considered confessional poetry. Right. Yeah. It's not just, it's not all, you know, Daddy, I hate you. you know, Sylvia Plath. Yeah. So, you know, ah, do, you had to die. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, so I, you know, the question is, do we like it? Because it's different. It's, you know, rubbing us another way. And, you know, and maybe most important of all, in what ways does separating the writer from the speaker liberate her as a writer? You know, it liberates her to explore character. Agreed, yeah. And then she can kind of put little bits of herself into those characters without people being like,

what did Taylor say? What did Taylor do? You know, because this is just, this is, this is Betty and James. This isn't Taylor, you know. Right. And, you know, that's it. Is we can look at the trilogy and we can say, oh, you know, we can separate that entirely. She's exploring characters.

You know, I'm acknowledging, you know, I'm not saying it's entirely free of that, but, and why should it be? You know, why do you need to remove yourself as the writer or, you know, you don't have to. In the greatest American dynasty, she clearly, you know, that last stanza, she clearly drops both feet firmly down on that form, right? It's about Rebecca Harkness, Rebecca Harkness, and then bam. Nope, this is about me. It's about me. Yeah, you know, and that's okay. She explores the character and then she finds herself in the character, you know.

But I think there's still an invitation for us to find ourselves in the character as well. You know, how many of us have a little Rebecca Harkness in us? Yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah, the town judging you for something. Yeah. People saying your wedding was gauche. Yeah, exactly, right?

Yeah, you did what to a dog? You know, and I do have to say I like it. I hope every one of us has a little drop of Rebecca Harkness in it. You know, that rebellion should be affixed somewhere in your personality makeup. Yeah. Okay, you know, note one sentence that reveals an interesting progression. She's writing about, quote, people I've never met, people I've known, or those I wish I I hadn't.

So what's interesting is not only does she talk about different types of people, but she's also progressing emotionally. So she goes from people I've never met, which is pretty neutral, to people I've known, which could be mixed emotionally, to those I wish I hadn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's kind of intensifying the stress and power of the emotional mixture. And I think it shows the function of storytelling. Yeah.

You know, that's what we do. That can, you know, we're supposed to result in an emotional response. Right. She's inviting us to be emotional. Okay, fourth. Okay. The fourth thing that the prologue does is it intentionally indicates an unstable relationship between truth and fiction. Right?

She says it blurs the lines. And between fantasy and reality. So she creates this unstable relationship. She refuses the common binary truth versus fiction. Right. Right. You've heard that. Is this truth or fiction?

Yeah. You know. No. You know, what is truth, doubting pilot-esque and did not stay for an answer? I'm sorry, that's a quote, Truman 16th century essay. We all knew that. Yeah, I'm sure you did. Well, but yeah, you know, in the Bible, three different times, Pilate says, you know, is this the truth?

Mm-hmm. Right. And, you know, Jesus kind of, you know, maybe it's your truth. Right. Right. Yeah. So that blurred line between what truth is and what fiction is, you know, when she tells the story of the greatest American dynasty and she tells the story of Rebecca Harkness and she puts herself into that.

Is that true or is that a fiction she wants to relate to us? I don't know. Yeah. Or somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in the middle. Yeah. Instead, what she does is she explores them, right? She sees them not as this or that, but as a continuum.

Right? So if truth is here and fiction is here, there's a storytelling slide that goes back and forth. Interesting. Yeah. I like that. So see it as a continuum. Because that's what she does. She offers a formula for how folklore emerges.

She says, quote, speculation over time becomes fact. Mids, ghost stories and fables, fairy tales and parables, gossip and legend. So she's got this like fragmental listing, which she does in her poetry. And she says, again, that's the process. That's the formula. Start with an image. Go to a character. Go to a story.

and then pass it into folklore where it becomes men's ghost stories and fables, fairy tales, and parables. And isn't this what we do with her songs? Absolutely. Right? I mean, again, I've read some of those comments. Yeah. And so many of them begin with, I think that, or my perspective is, or my take on this is, right? And I'm not making fun of that.

No, that's just how we all. turn this into folklore really. Right. Yeah. Or I've experienced this when and then we hear stories. You know, we hear stories about great and wonderful moments and we hear stories about very sad moments when a relative

passes or when we experience divorce or loss in another way. Yeah. You know, and so I'm not diminishing those comments. I'm saying that this is exactly what Swift as a writer wants us to do with this album. Yeah.

With this collection of poems, she wants us to take them. Okay? Yeah. I also think the list of genres that she explores is important. Okay, yeah. Consider the different types of poems in the work. Okay. You know, I mean, some of them are narrative.

Some of them do tend toward confessional. Some of them are purely characters. Some of them are connected. Some of them are not. You know, I just think that's the fun of engaging in the work. Yeah. Okay. Number five.

Okay. The last big comment. Okay. About the prologue. Okay. The last one is personal. Okay. I put number five, what does Uncle Jerry think the prologue allows her to accomplish?

Okay. Okay. Love that. So this is just me. Okay. First, number one, she gets to explore lives that are not explicitly hers. Right? Because so much of the past she has.

has explored her life, which is great because she makes it relative to our lives. Right. Right. Now she has another thing. She gets to explore lives that are not hers. You know, when I read a great book, I want to engage in those different characters. Right. You know, when I reread Nicholas Nickleby, I want to feel what his sister is feeling.

I want to experience what his evil uncle is doing. I want to explore his tenderness of his cousin, Smyke, who when he passes, I'm just, I'm just destroyed. You know, because Dickens lets us experience that character because he's explored that character. Right. I'm sorry, did I just ruin Nicholas Nickleby before you? Yeah, Smyke is Nicholas's cousin. He doesn't know about it. nearly the end of the book.

And he dies. But when he's buried under the tree that Nicholas and his sister used to play under. Oh gosh. When they were children. That's really upsetting. Well, I know. That's why it affects me emotionally. Yeah.

You know, and that's what she, I think there are moments when I'm reading these poems where I get engaged emotionally. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I read about the trauma nurse in a COVID ward, I get engaged emotionally, you know, because one of our family members, grandfather, died alone in a COVID ward. One of my good friends at church died in a COVID ward, you know. I think we all had someone, you know, among the million Americans who passed, among the millions worldwide who passed, you know. And if you can't engage in that with her, then you need to check your emotional barometer.

Again, this is just Uncle Jerry talk to you. Okay, secondly, I would discourage us from reading these works and playing the game of asking which guy is this about. You know, I think what's really different and unique about this is that biographical criticism, although it's valuable, and I have engaged in it, and you've all pointed that out. And I do engage with it with some of my favorite authors, right? Yeah, I mean, you can't read Hemingway without reading a couple of good biographies. I've read Papa Hemingway, you know, and so I don't know, it's... But these are a little different, you know, and so without automatically saying, oh, I think this is any one of a dozen guys she's been with, you know, think about it about in terms of your own life.

And if you are going to retell this as your character, right? How would you feel about it? Right, exactly. Right. Thirdly, I object to that approach, not because I discourage biographical criticism. You know I don't. You love it. But because I think it limits her artistic reach.

I absolutely agree. Okay. If you are just embedded in the life, of Taylor Swift, you know, then I really do believe you are missing a greater artistic world that she is creating here. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Because one of the things I'm going to say in the next episode is I think these poems create a coordinated artistic world.

And I think it's lovely. I think that we can engage in that and that we can do it without having to say, I think this is Jake or somebody. Yeah, I actually did an interview on a Swifty podcast this week. It's already out when this airs. And the podcast is called Swifty Over 50. It's this delightful man named Neil that hosts it. And he asked me when I, like when we're doing these episodes,

how do I decide when I bring in kind of the gossip and the lore and when I don't. And I was like, that's a really interesting question because I don't really like ever think like, okay, I am going to talk about this today or I'm not going to talk about this today. And I feel like a lot of you get frustrated with you're like, well, this was because of this.

And it's like, well, I know. I've been here. I know. I know it all. I know. I don't know. But sometimes it just doesn't add to the conversation. And I brought up specifically the Peter episode because that was like kind of earlier on.

I didn't really have like, you know, my instincts for what we talk about and weren't, like, weren't as, like, strong as they are maybe now. And I actually did bring in a lot of the biographical information in that episode, like in our conversation. But then whenever I got to the, and I didn't, it didn't, like, feel good in the moment when we were talking about it, because this song is just, like, so magical without that. This is so confessional of you at the fact. Yeah.

But then when I was editing that episode, I cut all of that out. Like, I took it all out. And so it was like that episode and that song and what we were discovering in that song was like so much wider and broader than she's talking about this dude. Yeah. And so I was like, this has to go because it like cuts off from like the beautiful like flow of like poetics and. conversation that we were having in that episode. And so I really do think that it's

becoming so much more clear to me that like you can go so much deeper in these songs without thinking about who she was thinking about when she wrote this or what situation she was going through. That is so beautifully said I want to hug you.

Well, especially because you touched on me when you said Peter, right? Because, you know, I know that there are autobiographical elements. You have, you have explained that to me, and I acknowledge them, and I get it. But the greatness of the poem, the artistic reach of the poem, the artistic world it creates encompasses me. Uh-huh, exactly. Yes. Right? And I think for the longevity of the poem, if it's only about her, then as the year is past, that impact will fade. Right.

You know, as the years pass and, you know, I'm just going to have to tell you, 200 years from now. You know, think 200 years in the future. And, you know, what do we know about Wordsworth today 200 years ago? Okay. What will we know about Taylor Swift 200 years from now? And, you know, and there will be some things we remember about her, clearly. But the historic impact, the longevity of the longevity of. of the work is the artistic world she creates.

So don't limit her artistic reach by saying this is simply about, as you say, some dude. Yeah. Yeah, like, it's like there's so much more, like using Peter as an example. Yeah. Like there's just so much more there that we can all like find inside of ourselves in that song than like this was like some guy that she thought she was going to be with forever when she was 25 or something. You know, like, yeah.

Well, and she does write that poem, and that's okay too. Yeah, yeah. Because we all had that experience, right? Yeah. I thought I might be with Valentina forever when I was in eighth grade. Which reminds me Oliver is coming up on that next year. Oh, no. Maybe he'll find the love of his life.

Oh, my gosh, he's very own Valentina. I know, and then she'll abandon him and he'll have to live with it in spitefulness. I mean, in wistful memory. Yeah. Okay, so I think, lastly, you know, what does Uncle Jerry think she accomplishes? I think she accomplishes exploring lives. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right?

Because what she does is she explores a teenager who learns how to apologize. Uh-huh. Right. She explores a woman in an adulterist relationship and, you know, the weight and the drug of it, you know. She explores a medic frantically trying to mitigate wartime trauma. She explores a nurse watching a patient die of COVID. She explores a childhood friendship with the secrets of childhood that are now revealed in adulthood. She explores a failed marriage.

She explores an abandoned lover. She explores a person struggling with addiction and thoughts of suicide. Yeah. You know, all these are characters who are not her, you know, or maybe facets of her, just like the faceted mirror ball. Right? And she's inviting us to see in these characters facets of ourselves. Yeah, because all of these are tiny bits of the human experience that she's just pulling

at, that we like all have a situation that can be... kind of like felt through that poem. Yeah. So my second big comment, that was like all my first big comment with several different parts. My second big comment or observation is she acknowledges the creative hold

that an artist has on her creation. She acknowledges that she has to release it. Mm-hmm. Right? And I think that this is really ironic. Okay. You know, if you think about the agency she spent on retaining the rights to her first six albums.

She re-recorded them all. Yeah, and then spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy them back anyway. Just to get the first set anyway. It's like, what's that thing that holds the water bag? Damn! I mean, she is a mad woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do not mess with her.

Yeah. If you think about how she spent so much agency to retain, to keep those rights, to make her music hers, you know. And then at the end of this prologue, she says, Yeah, she says, now it's, she says, I've told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve. And then she ends with one single line, one iceberg. She says, now it's up to you to pass them down.

She gives them to us. Yeah. I think it made me laugh when I read that long. Given my understanding of her history, retaining all of her rights. She scraped all these things together in a big pile and she says, it's mine. No, she's taking a different turn. In album number eight, is this, okay, good. Yeah.

Look at him, go. In album number eight, in isolation in COVID, she has discovered a new path. And she says, I'm going to give them to you. You know, here she realizes that the artist creates the work, okay, but it's the audience that controls its afterlife. Goosey. Yeah. So, you know, it's just a, it's an artifact that she has set down and walked away. away from.

Wallace Stevens writes a really great poem called Ajar in Tennessee. It's just this thing that sits there and he walks away from it. And it's this fascinating metaphor, you know, for what we do in life. We create things as we pass through life, but they are not ours. Right. You know, and sometimes they disappear with us. But sometimes they last. We live on, yeah.

You know, I think my grandkids, will tell granddaddy stories. Yeah. About, mostly about the wacky things. Yeah. I do with them. For sure. And occasionally about the love I show them.

You know, will Oliver remember that I spent four hours last night with him doing homework? Oh my gosh. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. But, but yeah, I think that those things we do, we, we set down on a hill in Tennessee and we walk away from, And somebody else controls their afterlife. We get to interpret the work.

Yeah, she explores this again at the end of the tortured poets department. The last song on that album is called The Manuscript. And she says, she ends it with, and the story isn't mine anymore. See, she's learning to give it up. Yeah. She's like all of this that I've gone through, the manuscript of my life like all of these

at that point 11 albums like they are out there and it is up to us to do with it what we will and she doesn't really have any say over it anymore and you know obviously with Opalite she still is in a great place and exhibits great joy over it

and she explores other characters like Elizabeth Taylor or father figures yeah yeah the mafia you guys. Yeah, I don't know. When you sent this, I just, I loved reading it and I immediately started dissecting it and thinking about it and I understood her methodology that this is new for her, from image to character, to story, to folklore, passing it on, you know, in this, again, I'm going to speak in terms of a continuum. You know, you, all things have a beginning, but not every

everything has an end. You know, I know, that's not actually a quote, that's just me. Yeah, you know, I think the cool thing is that this is an overt announcement. It reminded me of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the lyrical ballads. Yeah. Yeah, it's just like, okay, I'm doing a new thing here, and here's how it works. You know, it's not going to be, you know, my experience to emotions to poetry. poetry, it's going to take another path.

Yeah, it's kind of going the opposite direction. Right. Yeah, it's going to come from other things. And that's what we're going to see in these 17 poems. And the questions we're going to ask are things like, how do they relate? How do they share techniques? How do they share metaphors? How do they share images?

How do the characters resonate with one another? And I'm not just talking about the trilogy. I'm talking about all the characters. How do they how do they resonate? And those are things that we will explore next week. Next time, yes, ma'am. Okay.

Yeah. This is exciting. This is already really fun. We haven't even, like, gone into the poetry, really. Yeah, I think I did once present a paper on Dickens's prefaces at the MLA and Toronto one year. MLA Modern Language Association. So I was an MLA member for years. and so it's a very large gathering of literature geeks.

And they talk about things like, let's look at the prefaces to Charles Dickens' novel and see what Dickens himself said. And what I did is I took four novels, and I looked at the prefaces in different editions. Oh, interesting. Right. So I looked at the preface to the first collection,

and then I looked at the preface to the next collection, and then I looked at the preface to the publication of multiple novels together by one publisher a couple of years before he died. Okay. And so I compared what he himself had to say about his own work. Interesting. It was kind of fun. Yeah, I mean, Taylor has these for every album.

Does she? Some of them are poems, like the showgirl one and the tortured poets. Those are both poems. And then, yeah. But she always also writes a long thing, like in an Instagram caption. So once we get some more of this under our belts, we'll look at all those. Okay. Yeah, so scholars, for your next master's thesis, what you could do is collect all the prefaces and poems that are aside from the poetry in the album itself, and you could compare and contrast. You know, what does she say she's trying to do? How does she approach her creative, artistic life?

You know, and does it change? How does it matriculate? You know, that would be a fun thing to do. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not going to do it. I'm retired. We're busy. I might do it, though. Yeah, it would be interesting. Yeah, okay. Is that all for today then?

I think that's all for today. Okay, you will see us here again next week. I hope I whetted your interest in where we're going to go with folklore, the poems. Yes, okay. Then make sure you're following along everywhere on socials. You can find us on Instagram and TikTok at Swiftian Scholar Pod. You can find Uncle Jerry at Dr. And you can find me at Angela Wyat McDowell.

we will see you back here for part two next week. Bye!