Persephone asks

Mary and Eleanor answer Persephone's question

How does a poet create an elevator pitch?
How does one describe poetry?
This is my challenge with my music.

Today’s question comes from Persephone Godwin

Persephone, singer and song writer, refers to what Eleanor revealed in an earlier post: While riding on an elevator with an agent and discovered that, Eleanor pitched her novel and was picked up. Lucky day that was. I do have an anecdote about a famous elevator pitch that, for fun, I’ll close with.

To get to know our questioner, here’s one of her songs: “Shape the Winds”

The real q. here: How do song writers and singers get representation? My guess is that you know more about this than I do, but here’s a link to the big players according to Berklee.edu, where I know you studied.

I reached out to Ben Wakeman and Damon Krakowski and got this advice:

Ben:

1.	 “ Be so undeniably good that anyone who sees you will become a fan which will ultimately lead to the attention of someone who wants to make money from your talent (agent/manager)
2.	Hustle all the time to make your own breaks until you reach a level where someone who wants to make money from your talent (agent/manager)
Prior to the Internet, Napster and all the music streaming services that followed, the music industry operated in a more traditional fashion with gatekeepers who "made" artists into stars. The gatekeepers owned the keys to marketing and distribution and to engage them you pretty much had to have an agent/manager. Now there are no gatekeepers preventing you or me from recording an album, posting it on Spotify, and promoting it on social media, but we are competing with a tremendous amount of content with no way to stand out. It's the rare, exceptional independent musical artist who can break through from their recordings alone. 

Musicians earn the majority of their income from live performances and always have. Building an audience by playing in local clubs then touring regionally, then nationally, and ultimately internationally is the most common path to success for musicians. So, the first kind of "representation" a musician seeks is often a booking agent/tour manager and often this is just a member of the band or a close friend. Having an agent to "shop" for a record deal is a thing of the past because in many cases, the artist who has built a career from touring and independent recording stands to make a lot more money by having their own label for distribution rather than joining Columbia.

Damon:

“Representation” doesn’t translate to music directly. We have booking agents for live music - record labels for recordings -publishers for songwriting - lawyers for contracts - and managers (sometimes) to coordinate…

Advice: play live and post recordings and see what audience comes to you…

My guess is that the road is tough. I’m hoping we might also get some tips from the keyboardist of INCUBUS who’s now on tour in Australia and Asia. I know him, have reached out and when he finds time to answer how the band and their lead singer got representation, I’ll add his answer here.

Then there is your prosody q.:

How does one describe poetry.

Dana Gioia, renowned poet, whose interview with me I will post soon, audio and transcript, says in that exchange with me:

Tabor to Gioia: You’ve argued in favor of form in poetry but been careful to qualify that, to not make “form” reductive. T. S. Eliot in his seminal essay “The Music of Poetry,” says “Only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form.” What’s your take on that?

Gioia: I think there are two ways of writing a poem. One is to create a fabric of sound, a tune, a verbal song. The other is to arrange print on a page. A typographic and a musical organization. My own sense, and I know this is heretical to most people, is that the musical organization has always been the central lifeblood of poetry. The visual organization, while genuine, has been a secondary way of doing it. When poetry loses its ability to enchant and almost hypnotize the reader into an emotional bond with it, it loses the magic that great poetry needs.

Songwriters on poetry:

I do think the study of how poetry does what it does is also key for song writers. Two of the greatest poetic song writers for me are Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.

Cohen in interviews has said that when writing, “Layers of friendship fall away, and you know that you’re in it when you’re not doing anything else but trying to find the rhyme for ‘orange.’ It doesn’t exist. Some people say it’s ‘door hinge,’ but that’s not right.”

In Jeff Burger’s book about Cohen, he quotes Cohen when comparing his poems to his songs, “When it comes down to it, they are different things. It’s the same in that you have to sweat over both of them—at least I do. It doesn’t mean they’re good. A poem requires solitude, you stop as you’re reading and go back over it, the language is very dense and you can move any way you want. A song has a very fast, forward motion.”¹

I argue in my writing course, that all good writers—and that includes our great song writers, Bob Dylan and Cohen—understand prosody and that means they’ve studied how poetry works: the meter, the rhyme scheme, and most powerful in a great song for me: The imagery.

The listener when studying what makes good poetry, like the poet Auden, asks himself this question when he looks at the poem or hears it: "Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work? . . . What kind of guy inhabits this poem?”² —the first questions Auden asked himself when he read a poem. And good ones, I would think, for the song writer as well.

I provide links in my footnotes to lessons on meter³—and more for those who need more help.

As important, poetry works by avoiding trite imagery: Here’s a little game to explain. If you want to play, take this verbal Rorschach test, part 1: I give you an image. You write down the first feeling for each that comes to mind:

A dozen long stemmed roses

The lion and the lamb

A black cat

Here’s part 2: Again, I give you an image. You write down the feeling:

An empty doorway and a maple leaf

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea

Put your answers to both Rorschach poetry exercises in comments—that will help Persephone and others with her question—though I want to add here that I think Persephone’s song that I posted here shows she has a good understanding of this. Her line “Roll your breath into me” is a terrific and original image—as is the title “Shape the Winds.”

With that said, here’s my point: The images in part one of my exercise don’t do much work because they’re all too familiar.

In part two of that exercise: The images became more original and we’ll see why when we read “Ars Poetica”:

Ars Poetica

BY ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

A poem should be palpable and mute   
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless   
As the flight of birds.

                         *               

A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs.

                         *               

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.⁴

Now to close on a humorous note: An Elevator pitch:

The director Peter Bogdanovich tells this story from the time when he was interviewing the director Alfred Hitchcock and they get on an elevator together:

“We were in New York at the St. Regis Hotel, heading down to the lobby. We’d had drinks in his room. They get on at the 24^th floor and on the 18^th floor some people get on dressed for dinner. And Hitch turns to me out of the blue. ‘It was quite horrible. He was lying there in a pool of blood. Blood coming out of his ear, blood coming out of his nose.’ And I thought, What on earth is he talking about? Doors open on the fifteenth floor and more people get on. Hitch continues, ‘It was quite horrible. Blood everywhere.’ Everyone in the elevator knew who he was. He was very well-known. ‘Of course, there was a huge pool of blood on the floor and his clothes were spattered with it—Oh, it was a horrid mess. Blood all around! Well, I looked at the poor man and said, ‘Good God, man, what’s happened to you?’ And, Hitch continues, ‘Do you know what he said to me?’ At that point the elevator doors opened onto the lobby. No one wanted to leave the elevator. They wanted to know what happened. Hitch didn’t say a word. They had to get out. Hitch walked right by them and we crossed the lobby. I said, ‘Well, Hitch, what did he SAY?’ and Hitch said, ‘Oh, nothing—that’s just my elevator story.’”

I use this story in my novel-in-progress—but it’s here to lighten our conversation on this difficult subject of not only how to be seen and discovered, but how good stories work.

In the ultimate end, a good song is a good story set to music.

Here’s the link to Eleanor’s post “Dear Persephone”.

***

Eleanor and I ask you to remember that these are separate posts (we share the video that I record) but we both hope for comments on EACH of our posts—as they are separate. That’s the gift to us both as we work hard to study and consider each q.

***

 P.S.: I have a full course that I introduce here—the link is for you to take a gander—it’s free…. https://marytabor.substack.com/p/write-it-how-to-get-started

If you missed our launch post, take a look at Write it! and This Writing Life.

Ask us a question in Comments or Notes (be sure to tag us both). Or direct message me. I’ll get your q. to Eleanor!

Next up: Joshua Doležal

Love,

1. Jeff Burger, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interview and Encounters, Chicago Review Press, 2014.

2. W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, “Making, Knowing and Judging” Vintage International, 1962.

3. Meter in poetry: (part of this lesson is paid, but if you can’t afford it, write me). More lessons on poetry follow that one.

4. Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica” from Collected Poems 1917-1982. Copyright © 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Source: Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952)