Taylor Swift's ex-boyfriends don't have to matter

(If you don't want them to)

April 21, 2024

Taylor Swift named her new album The Tortured Poets Department, and when your colleague muses aloud, I wonder if we could get an actual poet to weigh in, and when you are an actual published poet on staff—before I wrote a memoir, I published three poetry collections, please buy one that is still in print—you know what to do. I remain frustrated with the Decoder Ring being the new default approach to pop music fandom. If that is your way into the music of Taylor Swift or anyone else, cool. But I maintain that nobody needs to know anything about this woman’s exes to enjoy, or not, this album. So I wrote a little bit about how to approach TTPD when you know next to nothing about its lore and don’t really care to learn more for Salon. Just stop thinking of Taylor Swift and start thinking about the Speaker:

In persona poems, the Speaker can be named or strongly implied to be an actual character, fictional or historical — you probably read Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" in school, you know this move. But even in poems presumed confessional, the Speaker can be a handy little imaginary friend to project the goings-on in the poem upon: Jackson in your workshop didn’t steal a bottle of nail polish from the bathroom of his one-night stand and then write a poem about it — "the Speaker” did. And just like that, it's easier to examine the color the Speaker palmed in the morgue-like glow of the medicine cabinet light and suggest that Orchid You Not might be the more appropriate choice for that Speaker's circumstances than Don't Take Me for Garnet without first sneaking a peek at Jackson's fingers. 

You can read the whole thing here if you’re looking for a way into this big culture moment but don’t have the stamina or interest for the deep dives into all the exes. (And yes, those are real nail polish names.)

For insights on why all of it, in fact, does matter, and what can be done with a Speaker and a fictional(ish)(ized) Swift, I’m reading Tavi Gevinson’s zine (!!!) Fan Fiction, which goes into exquisite detail on so many aspects of Swift’s persona and songwriting: “She collects souvenirs from relationships and immortalizes them in song, creating souvenirs of the souvenirs. She hoards them in a prepper basement strewn with conspiracy theories about emotional subtext.” (But parts 2 and 3 are where it gets really really good.)

Meanwhile, over on Twitter/X, people are arguing with Sadie Dupuis, actual poet and actual musician/songwriter, over her very uncontroversial statements that song lyrics are not the same as poems. I thought we had settled this decades ago! I wrote a lot about this in grad school and lectured on it in a seminar I used to teach and do not wish to re-litigate this because I need time to move forward, not in that flat circle, but here’s a short version: to complete the line in a song, the words need music. In a poem, the words do it all.

The 102 section of this crash course: When poets say “lyric poem” today we do not mean “words to a song.” The short version on this one": A lyric poem is a short-ish poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of one speaker (see above), as opposed to narrative poems, dramatic verse, that sort of thing. Song lyrics can still be “poetic” but what does that even mean? Find a more precise word. (← That’s the poetry professor in me talking.)

Of course there is way more to all of this—entire books on the subject of lyric poetry, of poems about songs and songs about poems. And even actual books of poetry! Written by poets! Please take a poet to lunch and ask them to sign one for you, and they will talk your ear off about lyricism and be so thrilled you asked. Poets wait years to be put into public service like this.

Speaking of poems, I collected my first HAD skull (iykyk) with the publication of “When I Tell You the Taco Bell Is Haunted Now,” and for those following along with the Erin Keane Decoder Ring, it’s based on a former Taco Bell in Louisville (on Preston by the fairgrounds, now actually a wing joint or something, not a coffee place) that most definitely went haunted (lights on; nobody’s home) before it finally closed. Yes, I know about Taco Bell Quarterly (I am a fan); yes, the poem went there first and yes, they did reject it; no, it wasn’t written solely for TBQ, I would have written it anyway. TBQ has an acceptance rate probably on par with the Paris Review at this point and I could not be more thrilled for them. The Taco Bell poems have escaped containment. It’s a whole movement. Live más, tortured poets; whisper your order into the static and see it return to you as a zine.