Jake Berry

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Jake Berry

Jake Berry is a poet and musician. The author of Brambu Drezi, Species of Abandoned Light, Drafts of the Sorcery, Scratching Face, Cyclones In High Northern Latitudes (with Jeffrey Side), Silence and the Hammer (with Wayne Sides) and numerous other books. He has been an active member of the global arts and literary community for more than 25 years. His poems, fiction, essays, reviews and other writings have been published widely in both print and electronic mediums. His solo musical albums include, Liminal Blue, Strange Parlors, Naked as Rain and the Animal Beneath, Shadow Resolve and many others. With Bare Kunckles he has recorded four albums, Trouble In Your House, Alabama Dust, Doppelganger Blues, and Root Bound. With the ambinet experimental group Ascension Brothers he has recorded numerous albums including All Souls Banquet, The Wedding Ball, and Pillar of Fire (which served as soundtrack for a series of plays by Ray Bradbury). And with Chris Mansel, under the name Impermanence, he has released an album called Arito. His ongoing projects include book four of Brambu Drezi, collections of short poems, solo and group albums and an oral online and print biography of the poet and critic Jack Foley.

Q: Do you think of your lyrics as poetry?

A: Yes and I think of my poetry as songs. It’s a matter of degree, a continuum. Some poems rhyme that I never write music for in a conventional sense. Some lyrics don’t rhyme in conventional song forms. But I hear all poems as sound first, so it’s all music. The music, like the words, is different depending on what the experience seems to suggest.

Q: Do you think it is important that songs rhyme and if so why?

A: No. In some songs rhyme helps to move the song, to emphasize the beat or a melodic phrase. On the other hand the intentional use of assonance, suggested rhyme, blank verse and slant rhyme can also be very effective in a song. Each song or poem seems to have its own demands.

Q: Do you think song lyrics must conform to recognised song structures such as clear rhyming schemes, choruses, refrains, hooks and bridges or that songs can also be like free verse?

A: Not at all. There are no rules, only traditions and styles. Songs could be free verse just as easily as rhyme and be a better song for it.

Q: When you read poetry in school or elsewhere did you recognize any connection to the music you enjoyed?

A: Occasionally the imagery in a poem would connect with the music I was listening to at the time. By the time I was in high school – 1973 – the connection between song lyrics and poetry had become a popular notion. Many of the popular songwriters of the time were respected as poets. Some had even published books of poetry before they’d ever made a record. Leonard Cohen for instance. Edgar Allan Poe was my first fascination with poetry, when I was 9 or so. His poetry is very musical. I recognized that there was poetry that was written for the page, but that didn’t make much of an impression because some of it was quite musical as well. The page is a wonderful medium for poetry because it allows the poet to emphasize the visual as well as the musical.

Q: Was there anything about poetry in books that influenced your songwriting?

A: Absolutely. Almost all the poetry I read in books that I liked influenced anything I wrote, whether it was something set to a chord progression or something I heard only in my head or as a solo vocal.

Q: Why do you think songs are more popular with people than poetry is?

A: There are many reasons for this. To a large extent the audience for popular music is more interested in the music than the words. They don’t care what the song is about as long as the music has a beat they enjoy, or a pretty melody or whatever. Another problem is that the only place many people get exposed to poetry is in school where it is part of a mandated curriculum. This alters the frame of reference so drastically from the origin of the poetry that even poets have trouble enjoying it. A good teacher might point out from the start that they are already enjoying poetry if they enjoy vocal music. Admittedly, the poetry one is likely to hear in many popular songs isn’t going to be very substantial, but it does serve to acquaint people with the musicality of words. If the teacher can make that connection there is a chance the students will begin to find poetry more interesting. Ultimately the problem may lie in the continued insistence by the academy and the marketers of popular music that poetry and songs are two different things. There are some poems that are designed for the page alone and some songs that don’t read well on the page. However, there remains some degree of musicality in any poem that can be vocalized, if only letter by letter, and some degree of poetry in even the simplest lyric. A letter is after all, a symbol for a sound and a simple lyric may have great meaning depending on the circumstances of the person who wrote it or the one hearing it.

Poetry, especially in the 20th century, became a victim of specialization. That was the trend – the notion that in order for someone to be good in a discipline one needed to devote all his or her time to a specific aspect of it. This makes sense in the sciences because the more we know the broader the area of study becomes and there is simply not enough time to know everything about all the sciences. Following the lead of the sciences the whole of Western culture became specialized. This was not necessary. I think we are beginning to recover from that misstep. And the sciences are discovering that it is beneficial if all the sciences collaborate to create a more complete picture of what we know and don’t know. Specialization was essential as a way of moving away from the ancient centralizations like monarchy, a single dominant religion and so forth. And specialization should continue, but in conversation. The arts can lead and are leading this development – not toward an elimination of specialties, but conversation and collaboration.