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We Hosted a Poets’ Listening Party for Taylor Swift’s New Album

Do The Tortured Poets Department lyrics stand up as poetry? We invited three actual poets to weigh in

When Taylor Swift was in grade 5, she won a national poetry contest with a free-verse meditation on “The Monster in My Closet.” Notable couplets include “Is he purple with red eyes? / I wonder what he likes to eat,” and “Could it be he wants to eat me? / Maybe I’m his favourite tray.”

About 20 years and several shelves of songwriting awards later, Swift has returned to her literary roots with her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department.

Of course, “Taylor as poet” is not a new concept: In interviews, Swift has said she dabbles in the form; a lyric in her song “Sweet Nothing” references writing verses during a car ride. But this is the first time she’s directly staked her claim as a poet, repeatedly referring to the new album’s lyrics not as songs but as “tortured poetry.”

We took this as an invitation to ask three published, award-winning Toronto poets to weigh in on Swift’s literary merit at a listening party on the album’s release day. The assignment: dissect three new songs as though Swift were a writer workshopping new pieces.

Joining us was Sanna Wani, a poet and poetry editor whose latest book, My Grief The Sun, was released in 2022. The Swiftie on this panel, Wani listened to Swift’s 2012 album Red on her way over. Jody Chan’s most recent volume of poems, impact statement, came out earlier this year and they are an artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s Queer and Trans Research Lab. Chan isn’t interested in Swift’s celebrity, but in why her work resonates with people the way it does. Adam Dickinson, an author of four books of poetry and a professor in the Department of English language at Brock University, came to Swift’s work through his daughters and is a fan of her 2020 album, “Folklore.”

So does The Tortured Poet’s Department rival the wordsmithing of Swift’s favourite poets, Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth? Read on to find out.

 
Photo: Universal Music Canada

Track 1: “The Tortured Poets Department”

Jody Chan: “I’m coming for her use of metaphor, off the top.

The Iranian poet, Solmaz Sharif, has a line in her recent collection where she says that ‘like’ is the cruelest word, which is talking about how metaphor can be a very dangerous political tool. It can be used to beautify things that are violent, or defang things that actually are dangerous.

I want to criticize that she would call her album ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ as a wealthy white woman in America who has not experienced anything close to that. That’s not to say that love is trivial, because everybody who has had their heart broken knows that’s not an experience to make light of. But it matters what you call things. It takes away from both of those things to liken them to each other, actually.”

Sanna Wani: “I like the way you’ve opened up the word ‘torture,’ because I got swept away by the cinema that she does so well. She’s tapping into a well-known metaphor there, and I like the way you’re stopping that in its tracks and being like, ‘The word torture means something, it’s a real thing.’

I wrote down, ‘Manic pixie dream guy, two toxic artists in love, problematic.’ Who is this about, and why is he so annoying? Why did you choose this as the representative poet, Taylor? We’re not all like this.”

There are a lot of clichés about poets in this song. Is she interrogating those clichés? Is she making fun of the dude who comes with his typewriter and acts like he’s Dylan Thomas?

Wani: “I feel like she has a crush on him. People love the beat poets for a reason; the tortured artist trope exists for a reason, for better or for worse.”

Chan: “I’m thinking about the difference between clichés in pop music versus in poetry. It’s what allows a lot of people to connect with pop, almost subconsciously, subliminally. The fact that she’s invoking this other genre of poetry is almost inviting a closer scrutiny of the language.”

Adam Dickinson: “What’s so interesting to me about Taylor Swift is that she has a wicked sense of humour. For me, she is playing with these clichés, these metaphors. She’s inviting us to think of the associations that are conventionally attached to them, but also, she’s playing around with us. She’s poking fun at the idea of romance, and historical attachments of that to poetry, but also [playing with] how to move around linguistically inside those metaphors.”

 

 

 

Track 2: “My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys”

Dickinson: “This song is less interesting to me. I think the image itself is pretty simple and repeated over and over again: My boy breaks his favourite toys, I’m his favourite toy, he’s breaking me. I do think it’s interesting that the agency remains with the speaker at the end: ‘Once I fix me, he’s going to miss me.’”

Chan: “It’s very repetitive, and from the top, the rhythm is very static. And again, she’s cached these weird and slippery metaphors invoking military and war in relation to love in a way that’s also infantilizing; this language of ‘my boy’ when you’re actually talking about an adult man, and removing his agency for the things he’s doing that are harmful to her.”

Wani: “I’m preoccupied by this dynamic that keeps appearing of the ‘red flag guy,’ the anxious-avoidant guy. I wrote random notes on the trope-y relational language that lately has gotten very popular. I find myself disappointed also, because I’m thinking about other songs where she’s talking about complicated relationships and it’s much more dexterous, much more interesting. The primary emotion when I hear this is a big sigh.”

Taylor Swift double album
Photo: Universal Music Canada

Track 3: “So Long, London”

The central metaphor here is London, the city, as a stand-in for a person whom we presume is her ex-boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn who is from London.

Wani: “One of her talents is the intimacy of her songs. She wants her fans to clue in, she wants the people who love her to know that it’s about that. Maybe I’m going too far, but I do feel that she leaves those crumbs for a reason. I immediately thought of Joe Alwyn as well.”

Dickinson: “[London] is a mood here, it’s a tone. I don’t know the romantic back story to this, so in the absence of that I paid more attention to the form. I liked the ‘so, so, long, long’ repetitions that we get in a few places. To me, these pulses were like tooting trains or the whistles of boats. I felt that very evocative of this specific historic scene, the movement of boats and the industry.”

Chan: “She slips back and forth between the third person—’I pulled him in tighter each time he was drifting away’—and the second person, ‘How much sad did you think I had?’ There’s an intimacy when you hear that second person that draws you in. There’s a calculatedness in that craft choice, about creating a certain relationship with her listener and her fans. You can still be close to her, even though actually she is very distant and very removed from you.”

Wani: “The language is quite straightforward: ‘I stopped trying to make him laugh, stopped trying to drill the safe.’ She’s trying, it seems, really hard in this relationship to keep it together, and it seems like she tried for a long time and it didn’t work out. Drilling the safe is an interesting picture, because when you drill a safe it’s because you don’t have the combination to get into the safe. That’s either because you haven’t been given the combination or you don’t know it.”

She also uses body and death metaphors here: “I stopped CPR, after all it’s no use. The spirit was gone, we’d never come to,” and later, “Two graves, one gun.” What did you think of those?

Dickinson: “Loved the use of CPR, less interested in the graves and the guns. For me, CPR is just, when have I seen that in a song? I was surprised by that. It’s a technical term but here it is put down in a song about a relationship. I like the tension that it creates. Graves and guns are endlessly present in songs like these.”

Wani: “I feel the same. I liked it in a lighter touch, like ‘My white knuckle, dying grip holding tight to your quiet resentment’ is more effective than ‘Stitches undone, two graves, one gun.’ It’s too hammy. It takes away from the scene that she’s constructed quite well thus far.”

Chan: “It’s attaching romance to this idea of mutual dying by suicide, wanting to die for love. But it’s sort of an unnuanced and uncritical take on that, that I find problematic.”

Wani: “She’s really taken by narratives that end in romantic self-annihilation. She loves that as a motif.”

Taylor Swift album art
Photo: Universal Music Canada

If Taylor Swift had submitted these as poems for your consideration, how would you rate her as a poet?

Chan: “I’m a bit allergic to the word ‘rate’ in relation to poetry, but maybe a question I would have for my friend Taylor is to consider her relationship to power and the way that her poems / songs exists in the world as objects to normalize a certain kind of political ideology. Maybe my question is more a comment about fundamentally disagreeing with the ethics of her work, and the ethics of her brand and her celebrity.”

Dickinson: “I try to remember that especially with somebody like Taylor Swift, these are pop songs. I remind myself to appreciate them in that way. I’m not being dismissive in saying that; I think to create art in pop music is an incredible achievement, and she has done this.

Do I like it when pop songs are complicated, and do weird and unusual things and engage the kinds of important political questions we’ve been talking about here? Absolutely, but I can still enjoy them when they’re not doing that.”

Wani: “The first thing that popped into my mind to say was, lean into your sincerity. You do sincerity well. And then I think I would ask her to consider what her goals are with poetry. Poetry is a beautiful, powerful vehicle, and I would want to welcome her into finding herself as a poet separately from a songwriter. I would ask her to get closer to the songs that felt like poems, and to lean into what she does really well. I would go back to ‘So Long, London,’ and think about what brought her to the lyric of ‘You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days,’ which I think is really successful.”


 

This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to the full conversation at the podcast link above.

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