When you give your band a name like Rainer Maria, after German symbolist poet Rainer Maria Rilke, you're really asking for it.
You risk coming off like those young would-be writers who name their dogs Emily Dickinson and their cats Young Werther and dress in pyjama tops or carry walking sticks and collect kitschy signs from restaurants as "found poetry."
(My own recent favourite is from a novelty shop in Yorkville, in which spray cans that claim to issue an, er, hilariously suspicious stench are flanked by notices in block letters: "DO NOT TRY. No matter how curious you are. Trust us, it really does smells bad. Parents, watch your children. Adults, watch yourselves." Volumes of tragic desk-clerk experience, summoned up in so few words.)
It only gets worse when people find out your drummer (Bill Kuehn) and guitarist (Kyle Fischer) were previously in a band named Ezra Pound. And that the guitarist met the bass player (Caithlin De Marrais) in an actual university poetry seminar in Wisconsin, and now they've been dating for an oh-so-not-rock 'n' roll six years and live in New York.
Strike three comes when you write songs like The Contents of Lincoln's Pockets: "At the time of his assassination: Two pairs of spectacles, a lens polisher, a pocket knife, a watch fob, a linen handkerchief, a brown leather wallet containing $5 in confederate money and nine newspaper clippings. This here is Walt Whitman's pen. . . . You've never been hit before. How can you deal with that kind of information?"
But one question remains. Say you also play loose, febrile, electric punk guitar and feature a singer, De Marrais, who can infuse those precocious words with the blue burn of a gas furnace, whose voice sounds like something biting off its leash and running for the wild? Say you perform tonight at the Horseshoe in Toronto (370 Queen St. West, $8, 416-598-4753, withJim Guthrie andthe Carnations ), and even someone who doesn't listen to lyrics suddenly notices his neck tensing, a little ache in the corners of his eyes?
Then are you still pretentious twits?
The underlying debate here, about songs versus poetry, is weirdly never-ending and utterly undistinguished by any kind of aesthetic honesty. It's the besotted against the snots, the wide-eyed poptimists against the defenders of the citadel -- cheers versus sneers, and whoever's scorn is snappiest wins.
I first encountered it in a used bookstore where I came upon a battered 1969 paperback, The Poetry of Rock, edited by the Village Voice music critic Richard Goldstein, who did nobody any favours by including the drivel of Jim Morrison and Procol Harum alongside the more plausible Dylan and Chuck Berry.
The blather rises again every time Paul McCartney or Lou Reed -- or the best-selling poet of our time, painfully enough, Jewel -- comes out with a book, practically to the point that you want to sit critics down and say, "How did this book hurt you, exactly? Did some mean old bully smack you on the back of the skull with it this morning? If not, mind if I do now?"
That these books mostly are horrible dreck, and that most lyrics do not and aren't meant to survive severing from the music, are such obvious points that I nearly fell asleep in the middle of typing them.
So is the fact that poetry has been oral, and often set to music, for more of history than not. Or that by any literal definition most lyrics simply are poetry when they're printed out; the question is whether they're useful poetry to body and soul.
The written and sung run about even in those stats. Most people just know more bad songs than bad poems.
Finally, contemporary poetry includes countless forms -- poetry written in grunts, in Klingon, in diamond shapes, in collage fragments, in aphasic decomposing monologue -- far more cracked than are dreamt of in rock's philosophies. Spouting technical metrics means less than nothing. And hell, no less a prig than T. S. Eliot had the nerve to say the best line of iambic pentameter in English was not in Shakespeare but in W. C. Handy's St. Louis Blues: "I hate to see that evening sun go down."
Really, the whole argument is about who gets to wear the musty crown of Poet, a designation nobody with a decent haircut wants nowadays anyway except when someone tells them they can't have it.
Many of the best poets in rock -- David Berman of the Silver Jews, whose book is even better than his albums, or David Thomas of Pere Ubu, for instance -- are careful to mock themselves in advance: "Listen," Thomas warns. "Here comes the poetry!/ 'I'm a cave with the wind inside'/ 'I'm a shell with the sound of the surf inside!'/ What?!/ What's the point, hunh?/ Don't be no misery goat!"
Others take it so earnestly it can kill them. The brilliant Shane MacGowan, once of the Pogues, has drowned his gift so deep in the myth of the drunken Irish poet that his performances are like watching a battered ship run aground. (Wednesday at Lee's Palace, 529 Bloor St. West, $27.50, 416-532-1598.)
Meanwhile, Andrew Motion, the British poet laureate, makes a simple observation: "Boys who would rather be seen dead than reading poetry do lie around on their bedroom floors reading song lyrics." A long-time Dylan fan, Motion used one U.K. National Poetry Week to poll Brits' favourite song lyrics, which amounted to a free bonus for every satirist snob in the British press.
I only know that if poetry's going to be done out loud -- and surely we sometimes want it to be, to balance, against our private visits with the page, some shared trips into the dizzy heights of our common language -- most of the time I'd rather hear it with a beat and a band, a verse rapped rather than declaimed in "spoken word."
When the sometimes strained, sometimes inspired poetry of Rainer Maria comes to me through the voice of Caithlin De Marrais, it makes a compelling effort to answer the prayer of Rilke himself -- "From me, and all of this, to make, Lord/ Some single thing."
Who cares what the classifiers call it?