Poetry of Progressive Rock

I am a fan of poetry especially Coleridges Rime of Ancient Mariner, Brownings My Last Duchess, and Pam Ayres humorous poems such as Teeth. I used to teach poetry to High School, and we looked at a huge amount of styles. Most students wanted to look at the darker side of poetry, such as from Mudrooroo and Coleridge. He would be my favourite and Tennysonn, and Keats.

Edited by AtomicCrimsonRush - June 17 2013 at 09:41

For anyone interested, I should also like to mention that I currently have a thread about Ezra Pound's poetry in the General Polls section.

I always believed Hammill was like Bob Dylan, a poet first, a musical artist second. Looking at his lyrics this would make sense. Dylan ia a visionary but not much of a singer. Hammill is also a visionary but thankfully can sing the fretboard off Dylan in every department. Poetry exists in prog no doubt but it is engaged in the thematic content. for me it is all about how the lyrics move me while listening to amazing musicianship. If the two line up,  a masterpiece is often the result. But its not Shakespeare...  

GG's lyrics can be humourous and cynical. I think there was some of that on Giant For a Day.

someone_else, the lyrics to The Cinema Show were written by Banks and Rutherford. Here’s an excerpt from a private mail from my brother (translated by me):

I wonder if Banks and Rutherford have delivered what Harold Bloom calls a “strong misreading” of Eliot’s lines — actually the only kind of reading Bloom thinks is worth anything at all. They are less concerned with soulless sexuality than with an eternally valid erotic play that — as the reference to Romeo and Juliet suggests — very often ends in tragedy (West Side Story has probably some significance here as well). Moreover, in The Cinema Show Tiresias gets a much more vital and vitalizing role than in Eliot’s poem: In The Waste Land, to a strong degree he (she) connotes an erotic/sexual fatigue that’s just as present in both sexes; the song seems more like a feministic myth where the female principle is identified with Gaia. Thus, The Cinema Show can be understood in the same way as Hart Crane’s grand epic poem (or series of lyrical poems) The Bridge — that Crane himself viewed as a more optimistic version of The Waste Land.

 

Well, I’m not altogether sure that this is a valuable input to the discussion at ProgArchives. However, what it once again shows, is how well schooled or — in the best sense of the word — cultivated these boys in Genesis are, something they share with members of the other British prog- and artrock bands. So when I still from time to time see intellectual skeptics claim that rock lyrics exclusively contain formulas like “I love you”, I wonder what side of the moon they inhabit — it’s certainly not the dark side. They can’t be especially close to the edge either, and they have still not found out that the lamb lies down on Broadway (titles by King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator spring to my mind as well, but I’d better stop while the going is good).

Tubes wrote: Interesting. But I'm more specifically interested in the poetry of whom I see as the true giants of progressive rock: Yes (Jon Anderson, although Howe, Squire, etc. made significant contributions), Genesis (Gabriel, but also Rutherford, Banks, Hackett, etc.), Jethro Tull (Ian Anderson), Van Der Graaf Generator (Peter Hammill), and to a lesser extent King Crimson (Pete Sinfield, Richard Palmer-James), and to an even lesser extent (the highly over-rated) Gentle Giant.

The highly over-rated Gentle Giant... I don't know if this indicates bad taste or a lack of understanding, not sacrilege anyway, though you seem to have angered some of their priests .
Anyway, I just don't agree. I did not spend much time analyzing their lyrics, but their music is virtuoso.

What I find more intriguing is putting Jon Anderson in line with other giants of progressive rock as lyricists for crying out loud. Ian Anderson, Roger Waters, Pete Sinfield and Peter Gabriel have some qualities as lyricists (the latter having written the best lines ever about sex in the chorus of The Cinema Show), but Jon Anderson is another story: although he can be credited with a major share in the shaping of some of the most beautiful gems of prog rock, many of his lyrics can be qualified as crap. In the best case it is like the 2001 Christmas letter from my aunt in California: full of misspellings, so that many words had another meaning than originally intended, which cost me three days to decipher .

It does not bother me one whit that GG lyrics are distinctly sub-par. The vast, vasty majority of prog lyrics are embarrassingly so. (Matter of fact, Im glad I do not understand Italian for this reason alone.)

Edited by Knobby - June 17 2013 at 07:47

Hey, it's not poetry. It's a bunch of bloody stoned rock stars man writing sh*t, Not poet laureates at a tea party. Sometimes it's cool sh*t but I wouldn't call it poetry.

Why on earth should that interest me, if I am, as I have stated clearly, MOST INTERESTED in early prog rock poetry?

I am interested in seeing whether someone already has examined Gentle Giant lyrics as serious poetical writing. I am interested to see whether, if it has been done that is to say, they also don't see much in it, like myself. If someone has undertaken this already, I would like to see some people here at Progarchives look at it for themselves. It might just do away with this hero-worship thing that GG and their 'fans' seem be involved in. This is the reason for my interest in GG lyrics. For my own purposes, however, I am more interested BY the writing of Anderson, Gabrial, et alia.