Reviewed by Ana Hein
The Poetics of Lyricism: The Lyric “I” in Kristie Frederick Daugherty’s Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift
Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift
Edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty
Ballantine Books
Dec 2024, 304 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0593982419
The long histories of poetry and music are stitched together by the strings of the lyre. In Ancient Greece, poetry was sung live with musical accompaniment from the lyre, the musical instrument of the God of poetry, Apollo, and from which the word “lyric” originates. Poetry retains the sonic qualities of music—rhyme, tempo, and meter—that define poetry as distinct from prose, as performer and writer Carol Kimball explores in her book, Art Song. “In a sense,” Kimball writes, “the singer becomes the poet, re-creating his poem in the texture of musical sound. We are not just singing words, we are singing poems.”
If this is so, then I put forth an irrefutable fact: Taylor Swift is the most prominent poet of our age. Her lyrics have not only profoundly influenced the music industry but also the modern literary landscape. With the publication of Invisible Strings edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty, Swift’s poetic legacy is cemented: a legacy defined by the emotionally charged, first-person perspective of the lyric.
Invisible Strings collects 113 notable poets—including Joy Harjo, amanda lovelace, Lang Leav, Diane Seuss, Mary Jo Bang, Carl Phillips, and more—each of whom contributed a poem in response to one specific song from Swift’s discography, though none of the songs are confirmed within the text. Sometimes, it’s fairly easy to discern which poems align with each song, as with the poem “Hark, the Raucous Heiress Speaks,” by Shikha Malaviya, whose title references Rebekah Harkness, the subject of Swift’s “the last great american dynasty.” More often, however, the reader must analyze the literary techniques, references, and themes of each poem to decode how they relate to Swift’s work.
There is, however, one holistic consistency between the anthology and Swift’s music: the use of the lyric, a poetic form defined by poet Edward Hirsch in The Essential Poet’s Glossary as “the most intimate and personally volatile form of literary discourse… [that] asserts the value and primacy of the solitary voice, the individual feeling.” The lyric expresses emotion via the subjectivity of the first-person speaker, the “I” of the poem—it’s a compressed personal essay with a musical lilt. “Hi, I’m Taylor. I write songs about my feelings,” Swift said during her Red Tour. “I’m told I have a lot of feelings.”
The poems in Invisible Strings span the emotional register, covering furious heartbreaks (see Andrea Cohen’s “Duet”), grief (see Betsy Sholl’s “I Revert to a Familiar Theme: You”), longing and love (see Christopher Citro’s “You’re So Gross and I Love You”), the awe of parenthood (see Jeannine Ouellette’s “Firstborn”), innocence and its corruption (see Erin Belieu’s “Cocklebur”), and the ecstatic community we find through art (see Rodrigo Toscano’s “Espectacularistas”). Ilya Kaminsky, in his poem in the anthology, “Of Flight,” writes, For a lyric
is a string tied to gears—to slow the clocks
in each
word, toward
the angle of what cannot be said.
“[W]hat cannot be said” is the feeling the words elicit—they aren’t said; they are felt via the vehicle of language.
“Reading poetry is an act of reciprocity,” Hirsch writes for the Poetry Foundation, “and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into right relationship to each other,” that right relationship being based around emotional connection with oneself through the emotional interiority of another. This is also the purpose of all good songs, as Swift said in her acceptance speech for the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade Award: “A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you.” Her self-described “fountain pen” style of songwriting, the most common creative mode she employs, focuses on detail to evoke intensive, personal emotion. In songs like “All Too Well” and “Timeless (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault),” Swift takes up T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, using a forgotten scarf and a box of black-and-white photographs as emotional triggers for, respectively, longing over a broken relationship and a destined, enduring love. Swift’s artistic aim with the lyric is to “[p]lac[e] yourself and whoever is listening right there in the room where it all happened,” using her personal experience—the lyrical “I”—as an engine for emotional connection with her listener.
That’s the power of the “I” in lyrical verse: it’s never just about the speaker alone, but the reader or listener that’s encompassed in that “I.” As Mutlu Konuk Blasing explores in Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words, the lyric “I” encompasses a plurality of perspectives. There’s the speaker of the poem, the author composing it, the authorial past-self formed around the experience they’re drawing from, the reader overlaying their own perspective on the emotional tapestry of the fixed language, and a collective, existential humanity from which universal emotion is established; it is all these things simultaneously and none of them definitively.
Barbara Hamby demonstrates this fluidity of readerly self-identification in her poem “Ode to the Little Girl Singing Karaoke at My Nephew’s Wedding Reception.” The titular karaoke song is, of course, a Taylor Swift song, probably “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” based on a reference to the iconic Swift lyric, “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.” In that song, Swift’s speaker analyzes a relationship with an older man conducted when she was 19, wrestling with the lasting negative impact it had while admitting that “the God’s honest truth is that the pain was heaven,” occupying both the persona of the naive teenager and the wise, regretful adult. Hamby’s speaker addresses the little girl at the wedding reception:
…you’ve got the moves down,
but you’re only eight or maybe nine, and the lyrics
coming out of your buttercup mouth are ten years down the road,
wanting your girlhood back though you’re in the middle of it[.]
The little girl claims Swift’s experience—the song’s lyric “I”—as her own through her rendition, even though the song is based on emotions she’s yet to understand or feel, collapsing Swift’s speaker and her listener into one singular melodic voice. In the following lines, Hamby’s speaker turns the focus back onto her own past experience:
and I’m thinking of the time that my heart was on fire with pain Hein / The Poetics of Lyricism / 5
and it was a kind of heaven, because the vanilla ice cream
of girlhood was melting and finally I was feeling something
brutal and deep, wanting so much to hurt someone
I can barely remember now, and time seems to converge[.]
The poem diverges from the wistful, reflective joy of the wedding to the speaker’s own more volatile personal history, contrasting the innocence of the little girl singing karaoke and her own “vanilla ice cream” sweet girlhood. The speaker’s “I” creates a new emotional tenor for the poem, and the use of polysyndeton to connect clauses blurs time, creating one rich, expansive moment that contains the feelings of the speaker’s past, the reality of her present, the little girl’s identification, and Swift’s artistic influence, not to mention the reader’s own emotional resonance with the poem itself.
The mutability of the “I” and the evolution of self takes central focus in Diane Seuss’ poem, “The Lucky One.” The poem’s speaker cycles through different “eras” of her life, echoing the conception of albums as individual eras distinguished by their unique aesthetics, themes, and sounds that define Swift’s canon. As the speaker “shed[s] a thousand selves / like flimsy gowns,” a new persona is revealed, along with a different, era-defining emotion. The speaker begins at “feather-young, / just seven,” unable to express her grief. “Then came my romantic era,” where the speaker falls in love with love at “[b]arely thirteen,” and realizes that “Love left tracks. Mouse turds / on the butter dish.” After her heartbreak, the speaker enters “the era of rebellion,” characterized by “bruise-blue” eyeshadow worn “like a boxer, not a martyr” and the name “‘Syliva’ in red lipstick / on my jeans,” an era meant to demonstrate imperviousness but that highlights the fragility of the speaker’s position as a female subject. Eventually, once the narrator has been reborn those thousand times, she is left with “the sun-kissed chrysalis, / breaking its artifice.” The speaker is an “I” in perpetual becoming, but never is any one version of that “I” portrayed as false—they are all true, at all times, because the lyric “I” encompasses every era a person experiences, along with all the possible emotions those eras elicit.
There is perhaps no other artist as obsessed with cataloging every evolution in self as Taylor Swift. The Eras Tour uplifted every album Swift has created (RIP Debut) and every version of herself Swift has recorded. During the acoustic set, she altered the set list every night, nearly playing through her entire discography and creating brand new mashups, offering up a new, unreplicable self for concertgoers with each performance. She’s spent the last several years re-recording previous albums, releasing new songs penned from long ago into a new context, rewriting the narrative of her life, and creating a new companion persona to go with each era revisited. “‘I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now’ / … / ‘Why? Oh, ‘cause she’s dead,’” Swift sings in “Look What You Made Me Do,” whose music video simultaneously celebrates Swift’s past selves and eradicates them. A mountain of Taylors, each dressed in iconic outfits from different performances, eras, and music videos, scramble over each other trying to reach the top, where the “rep” Taylor stands tall. As an emblem of her album reputation, for which “Look What You Made Me Do” was the lead single, this Taylor, this lyrical “I,” is not the self as experienced, but the self as perceived by others. In placing it as the dominant Taylor on the pile, not only does she illustrate how her “reputation” is formed in response to every past iteration of herself, but she is able to subsume this perceived self back into the lyrical narrative of her music. She lays claim to the emotions—those the media ascribe to her and her feelings in response to that assumption—this self can elucidate: frustration, glee, revelry, wickedness, and isolation, and she infuses them into her work.
Joy Harjo echoes Swift’s self-reflective streak in her poem, “On the Stairs,” which is a retrospective examination of the life of an isolated poet. “I am never who they wanted me to be, not who they are,” the speaker says, explaining her solitude on the titular stairs. For company, “It’s me, my notebook, and my voice beyond my years,” emphasizing how the persona of the speaker is divided between the individual (“me”), the artist (“my notebook”), and the multiplicity of self poetry provides (“my voice beyond my years”). The speaker says:
Not then, not now, there is something else there, I mean here,
In the dark where the poets live, outside the lines of perfect
In the deep-down outskirts of unmeasured eternity.
This is me. I have no excuse. It doesn’t matter the stares[.]
demonstrating how the speaker’s totality has become her poetry with the simple declarative sentence, “This is me.” “This,” of course, meaning the ecstatic possibilities a life of art making can bring, along with its pitfalls—the speaker is her circumstance is her life. “I prefer the stars, and all the ways to get there,” she declares, shaking off her haters and further forging her path ahead. “I am eighteen, thirteen. I am forty, or beyond the count. / You will find me somewhere there with my notebook in my hands.” In acknowledging her past, she collapses the boundaries of herself—she makes her work timeless, and her lyric “I” is free to explore the infinite expanse of the artistically ambiguous “somewhere” she occupies, ready to document it. This is also the first direct address in the poem, folding in the reader into the nameless people observing and judging the speaker from afar, the people who silently shape her self through perception. But if the lyric “I” is meant to also encompass the reader, this means the reader is both the perceived and the perceiver. It’s a feedback loop of influence Swift is all too familiar with: the self under its own scrutiny because of the scrutiny of others, prompting even further self-reflection, ad infinitum. All of it is integral to shaping the lyric “I,” and all of it is within its bounds.
Kristie Frederick Daugherty describes the interconnectivity of Swift’s work most poetically in her introduction to Invisible Strings: “This is the magic of Taylor Swift—a magic she cultivates in her fan base. Everything connects. The center does not fall apart—it orbits itself to create a new thing.”
In all emotionally honest writing, the writer is always shaped by the writing of the text. In Swift’s discography, there is no better place this can be heard than on the final track of the extended edition of her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, “The Manuscript.” It’s a song cataloging the speaker’s various love affairs and how the transformative act of writing them has both preserved her feelings in words and exorcised them from her experience: “And the tears fell in synchronicity with the score / And, at last, she knew what the agony had been for[.]” The answer is that it was for art. The speaker is a third person “she” for most of the song until the outro, when she can claim this personal experience of heartbreak: “Now and then I reread the manuscript / But the story isn’t mine anymore[.]” She can claim ownership of her tale, but she also must leave it behind, for the self she was when it was composed is gone, transmuted into text forevermore—that self, that story, that “I”, can only be accessed and felt by the reader.
Perhaps the poem in Invisible Strings that best sums up the ethos of the lyric—and Swift’s entire artistic project—is Tess Taylor’s poem “If I Could Tell Her What I Know Now.” The final lines of the poem read:
How much we love
the ones we love Hein / The Poetics of Lyricism / 9
when we first love—
even when there’s nothing left
to do but sing
or dance or roller skate.
To try. To try again.
To try and sing: to sing and cry.
No matter the feeling, we must express it with the only tools we have available: language. We do it until we get it right. And even then, we never stop. Expression—of feeling, of sentiment, of meaning, of self—is the core of our humanity. That’s what Taylor’s music and the poetry in Invisible Strings offer: a vehicle to express ourselves, to feel alongside another, and in doing so, deepen the feeling, changing who we are as people, turning the lyric “I” into a collective “we”.
About the reviewer: As a die-hard Swiftie who recently completed her MFA at Columbia in the nonfiction program, Ana Hein brings the energy of a fangirl and a critic’s sensibility to her review. Her previous writing has been featured in The Rumpus, Digging Press Journal, and Videodame, among other publications, and is forthcoming in AFM.