Nr. 2 (19) anul VI / aprilie-iunie 2008 - ROMDIDAC

spiritul rock şi poezia
CHRIS TĂNĂSESCU
Rock’n’ Poetry. A Study of Rock’n’ Roll
in Contemporary American Poetry
R
ock poetry is an overwhelmingly rich and restlessly ongoing phenomenon
which turns out even more complex while analyzed in relationship with
contemporary poetry in general and with contemporary literary and
mainstream poetry in particular. Its richness and vitality prompted me to
advance in this chapter two new dimensions to its common meaning of
rock lyrics, a development I sensed as necessary due to on the one hand
the assailing of and will to integrate into the establishment on the part
of the former poor cousins, the rock poets who have published books of
poetry, as well as on the part of critics and academics who have tried to
appraise these poets’ lyrics and/or published poetry as part of a more
or less ‘universal’ and ‘timeless’ canon, and on the other hand by the
importance that rock culture has gradually proved to play in the works
of significant established or arising poets in contemporary American (or
English language) letters.
It is for the above mentioned reasons as well as because of the fact
that writing on popular culture in general or particularly on rock culture
has always to be a down-to-fact and cross-perspective approach that I
will not come up with that refining of the definition of rock poetry until the
half of this chapter. Moreover, the ramification of the matter as well as
the width of the cultural scope we will have to consider will prevent me
from asking ‘what makes a poem a rock poem’ until the last subchapter,
but I think the more a final verdict is postponed the richer and the more
judicial its preparatory direct- and cross-examinations will be.
But then, in poetry no verdict is the final one – if presumably one
even deigns to accept the idea of a verdict in the first place – and that
is why I have chosen to just refine and detail the thematic, motif-related,
and literary history aspects as instantiations of the general contemporary
poetry involving ones (popular culture included) while providing a few
pragmatic possible technical, prosodic and formal features that may help
us in assessing a poem or even a poetry as possibly readable as rock
poetry. And thus, as I hope, the academic question of rock poetry will
remain poetically open.
Ex Ponto nr.2, 2008
121