From Song to Poem in the Work of Nick Cave
by Jones Irwin
In times of strife, we have our imagination, we have our creative impulse, which are things that are more important than material things. They are the things that we should magnify (Patti Smith, quoted Popova 2023).
We live unequivocally in times of great strife. Whether for example in terms of political division or in terms of climate crisis or indeed in terms of the connections between the two, many of us are experiencing a time of tension and alienation. As Patti Smith notes, it is at such moments in history that the work and vision of the imagination becomes especially important. This work of the imagination can be expressed across many different channels and mediums of communication and expression. Artists such as Smith embrace a multi-disciplinary conception of such possibilities as they articulate their vision through poetry, music, film, painting and even photography. This multi-disciplinary expressionism raises questions as to the relation between these specific approaches to or domains of art. Are each of these domains specific and unique, or are they interrelated, and if the latter in what way can we understand such relationality?
Smith herself makes an attempt to distinguish most especially between the aims and purposes of these domains. She pays particular attention to the two which most impacted her own work, those of writing/poetry on the one side and songwriting as a craft on the other. The distinction she makes is between a poetry which she claims is written more for oneself, for the subjective self in a kind of privacy while songwriting rather is conceived in terms of an expected performance and is thus more for ‘the people’, a public and inter-subjective act rather than a subjective one (Popova 2023: 3). This is a helpful and honest distinction but also a problematic one. For is songwriting not also often a subjective act at the outset and also can poetry not often also become a public act, a performance to a wider audience? The distinction seems blurred in such contexts especially when one considers that artists such as Smith precisely move across these boundaries of private and public all the time in both their songwriting but also in their poetry.
Nick Cave is a related example of this blurring and complexification of the relation between poetry and song. As with Smith, his own work is multi-disciplinary in combining song lyric, music, poetry, prose, as well as film and photography. Similarly to Smith, Cave is preoccupied with the relationship across and between these different domains of art. Here, insofar as our particular focus is on the relation between poetry and song, we can say that Cave’s own vision can be very enlightening to us in seeking some perspective on this complex question. In his Foreword to a collection of Cave’s lyrics, Will Self cites an argument which he had with the music journalist Barney Hoskyns over the distinction between lyric and poetry in popular music, where Hoskyns cited Smokey Robinson’s simplicity of lyric as the quintessence of what makes a good song (Self 2001: ix). In contrast, Self argues that it is precisely the complexity and ambiguity of, for example, some of Bob Dylan’s lyrics which make him both a great lyricist and poet simultaneously. The specific lyric example he gives is of Dylan’s song ‘Visions of Johanna’, where the verse goes ‘On the back of the fish truck that loads/While my conscience explodes’.
Self develops his argument further in exploring the vision and poetics (through music and song lyric) of Nick Cave. He notes a growing appreciation on his own part of Cave’s depth as a lyricist and poet (initially knowing him only as a passing acquaintance, ‘an affable if gaunt bloke I saw at barbecues with his kids’ (Self 2011: xi)), with Cave having a particular gift for writing and singing about love. ‘He stands as one of the greatest writers about love of our era. Each Cave song is already perfumed with yearning, and already stinks of the putrefying loss-to-come’ (Self 2001: xii).
In his own lecture text included in the collection, ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’ (Cave 2001), Cave takes up this theme overtly, exploring specific lyrics of his own for their poetic provenance. His interpretation of the song lyric ‘West Country Girl’ is almost a perfect distillation of Self’s argument. ‘Her accent which I am told is ‘broad’/That I have heard and has been poured/Into my human heart and filled me/With love up to the brim and killed me/And rebuilt me back anew/With something to look forward to’ (Cave 2001: 2). Here we have all the ingredients of a great song lyric, the poise and the rhyme, the timing. But there is also an existential-philosophical narrative at work here in miniature, a kind of microcosm of love’s work, which starts off as naïve and seemingly beautiful (as well as enticingly erotic and full of allure) but then goes all wrong – ‘and killed me’. What a three word death-knell for the original vision, so succinct, so final. But it is perhaps the next line which perhaps takes us beyond the lyric song into poetry – ‘and rebuilt me back anew’. We are now dealing with contradiction – how might the death of love lead to renewal, exactly? – and paradox. The ambiguity of these tense lines, sang together as if a bow and arrow were maintained in a tension without being released (as in Heraclitus’ original paradox ‘the bow and the arrow are one’), takes us unequivocally into the poetic domain.
And, finally in this context, if we return to Patti Smith’s argument that what distinguishes song lyric and poetry is that the former is a public act and the latter a phenomenon more private, we can perhaps say that in this instance we see Cave move us definitively beyond this binary opposition of poetry/lyric and private/public. As Self notes, ‘a songwriter who was far more than the sum of these parts: the aching heart of Smokey, implanted in the tortured breast of Zimmerman’ (Self 2001: xii). These songs for Self at least, are a both/and movement – they are both lyric and poem, both private and public at once. This is what gives them an undeniable power and provenance but also makes them problematic and slippery for us, maybe even painful, a source of tension and suffering. Moreover, in Cave’s own reading, there is a moment here where a transfiguration occurs which is even more fundamental than our understanding of the songwriter’s vision as such. We asked above regarding the existential tensions of ‘West Country Girl’, how might the death of love lead to renewal, exactly? If Cave’s love is now unrequited (and of course the song does have a personal flavour, being reputedly about his doomed love affair with Polly Harvey), then how exactly is there a rebuilding back anew? We might be tempted to think that this renewal or reconstruction refers to a new love, a new relationship, built on the ruins of the doomed affair?
But in his ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’, Cave gives us another way to understand this puzzle, ‘But the peculiar magic of the Love Song, if it has the heart to do it, is that it endures where the object of the song does not’ (Cave 2001: 3 [Cave’s emphasis]. This is beautifully put. ‘If it has the heart to do it’ recognises how painful this realisation this is for the artist, that the work he devoted to a lover survives while the love has died.
References
Cave, Nick (2001) ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’ in Cave, Nick (2001) The Complete Lyrics 1978-2013. Penguin Books, London.
Cave, Nick (2001) The Complete Lyrics 1978-2013. Penguin Books, London.
Popova, Maria (2023) ‘Patti Smith on the Creative Impulse and the Crucial Difference Between Writing Poetry and Songwriting’. TheMarginalian.org.
Self, Will (2001) ‘Foreword’ in Cave, Nick (2001) The Complete Lyrics 1978-2013. Penguin Books, London.
We live unequivocally in times of great strife. Whether for example in terms of political division or in terms of climate crisis or indeed in terms of the connections between the two, many of us are experiencing a time of tension and alienation. As Patti Smith notes, it is at such moments in history that the work and vision of the imagination becomes especially important. This work of the imagination can be expressed across many different channels and mediums of communication and expression. Artists such as Smith embrace a multi-disciplinary conception of such possibilities as they articulate their vision through poetry, music, film, painting and even photography. This multi-disciplinary expressionism raises questions as to the relation between these specific approaches to or domains of art. Are each of these domains specific and unique, or are they interrelated, and if the latter in what way can we understand such relationality?
Smith herself makes an attempt to distinguish most especially between the aims and purposes of these domains. She pays particular attention to the two which most impacted her own work, those of writing/poetry on the one side and songwriting as a craft on the other. The distinction she makes is between a poetry which she claims is written more for oneself, for the subjective self in a kind of privacy while songwriting rather is conceived in terms of an expected performance and is thus more for ‘the people’, a public and inter-subjective act rather than a subjective one (Popova 2023: 3). This is a helpful and honest distinction but also a problematic one. For is songwriting not also often a subjective act at the outset and also can poetry not often also become a public act, a performance to a wider audience? The distinction seems blurred in such contexts especially when one considers that artists such as Smith precisely move across these boundaries of private and public all the time in both their songwriting but also in their poetry.
Nick Cave is a related example of this blurring and complexification of the relation between poetry and song. As with Smith, his own work is multi-disciplinary in combining song lyric, music, poetry, prose, as well as film and photography. Similarly to Smith, Cave is preoccupied with the relationship across and between these different domains of art. Here, insofar as our particular focus is on the relation between poetry and song, we can say that Cave’s own vision can be very enlightening to us in seeking some perspective on this complex question. In his Foreword to a collection of Cave’s lyrics, Will Self cites an argument which he had with the music journalist Barney Hoskyns over the distinction between lyric and poetry in popular music, where Hoskyns cited Smokey Robinson’s simplicity of lyric as the quintessence of what makes a good song (Self 2001: ix). In contrast, Self argues that it is precisely the complexity and ambiguity of, for example, some of Bob Dylan’s lyrics which make him both a great lyricist and poet simultaneously. The specific lyric example he gives is of Dylan’s song ‘Visions of Johanna’, where the verse goes ‘On the back of the fish truck that loads/While my conscience explodes’.
Self develops his argument further in exploring the vision and poetics (through music and song lyric) of Nick Cave. He notes a growing appreciation on his own part of Cave’s depth as a lyricist and poet (initially knowing him only as a passing acquaintance, ‘an affable if gaunt bloke I saw at barbecues with his kids’ (Self 2011: xi)), with Cave having a particular gift for writing and singing about love. ‘He stands as one of the greatest writers about love of our era. Each Cave song is already perfumed with yearning, and already stinks of the putrefying loss-to-come’ (Self 2001: xii).
In his own lecture text included in the collection, ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’ (Cave 2001), Cave takes up this theme overtly, exploring specific lyrics of his own for their poetic provenance. His interpretation of the song lyric ‘West Country Girl’ is almost a perfect distillation of Self’s argument. ‘Her accent which I am told is ‘broad’/That I have heard and has been poured/Into my human heart and filled me/With love up to the brim and killed me/And rebuilt me back anew/With something to look forward to’ (Cave 2001: 2). Here we have all the ingredients of a great song lyric, the poise and the rhyme, the timing. But there is also an existential-philosophical narrative at work here in miniature, a kind of microcosm of love’s work, which starts off as naïve and seemingly beautiful (as well as enticingly erotic and full of allure) but then goes all wrong – ‘and killed me’. What a three word death-knell for the original vision, so succinct, so final. But it is perhaps the next line which perhaps takes us beyond the lyric song into poetry – ‘and rebuilt me back anew’. We are now dealing with contradiction – how might the death of love lead to renewal, exactly? – and paradox. The ambiguity of these tense lines, sang together as if a bow and arrow were maintained in a tension without being released (as in Heraclitus’ original paradox ‘the bow and the arrow are one’), takes us unequivocally into the poetic domain.
And, finally in this context, if we return to Patti Smith’s argument that what distinguishes song lyric and poetry is that the former is a public act and the latter a phenomenon more private, we can perhaps say that in this instance we see Cave move us definitively beyond this binary opposition of poetry/lyric and private/public. As Self notes, ‘a songwriter who was far more than the sum of these parts: the aching heart of Smokey, implanted in the tortured breast of Zimmerman’ (Self 2001: xii). These songs for Self at least, are a both/and movement – they are both lyric and poem, both private and public at once. This is what gives them an undeniable power and provenance but also makes them problematic and slippery for us, maybe even painful, a source of tension and suffering. Moreover, in Cave’s own reading, there is a moment here where a transfiguration occurs which is even more fundamental than our understanding of the songwriter’s vision as such. We asked above regarding the existential tensions of ‘West Country Girl’, how might the death of love lead to renewal, exactly? If Cave’s love is now unrequited (and of course the song does have a personal flavour, being reputedly about his doomed love affair with Polly Harvey), then how exactly is there a rebuilding back anew? We might be tempted to think that this renewal or reconstruction refers to a new love, a new relationship, built on the ruins of the doomed affair?
But in his ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’, Cave gives us another way to understand this puzzle, ‘But the peculiar magic of the Love Song, if it has the heart to do it, is that it endures where the object of the song does not’ (Cave 2001: 3 [Cave’s emphasis]. This is beautifully put. ‘If it has the heart to do it’ recognises how painful this realisation this is for the artist, that the work he devoted to a lover survives while the love has died.
References
Cave, Nick (2001) ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song’ in Cave, Nick (2001) The Complete Lyrics 1978-2013. Penguin Books, London.
Cave, Nick (2001) The Complete Lyrics 1978-2013. Penguin Books, London.
Popova, Maria (2023) ‘Patti Smith on the Creative Impulse and the Crucial Difference Between Writing Poetry and Songwriting’. TheMarginalian.org.
Self, Will (2001) ‘Foreword’ in Cave, Nick (2001) The Complete Lyrics 1978-2013. Penguin Books, London.