What Do Actual Poets Think of The Tortured Poets Department?
On Friday, Taylor Swift will release her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department. Swift announced it at the Grammys and soon after revealed herself to be the chairman of the titular department. Swift is most admirable as a songwriter, but has she really put in the work to earn the title of chairman? It’s time for a peer review. What do real-life poets think about Taylor Swift branding herself as the tortured-poet-in-chief?
“The seriousish poet in me finds it really annoying,” poet Emily Alexander said. “The idea that a poet is this sort of existential, ethereal, all-knowing entity that somehow has this sort of knowledge that other people don’t have? I think it makes for bad and very self-involved poetry.”
We got a glimpse at Swift’s poetry earlier this week, as well as a peek at her vision for an actual tortured-poets department. In collaboration with Swift, Spotify opened a pop-up library in Los Angeles, where some of the lyrics from the upcoming album were on display. One piece of paper read, “My muses, acquired like bruises / My talimans [sic] and charms / The tick, tick, tick of love bombs / My veins of pitch black ink.” The lyrics had been typed out on a typewriter, the paper given the eighth-grade social-studies project treatment (dabbed on the edges with a tea bag to look old).
Taylor Swift you keep gagging me pic.twitter.com/ei4m3DgODt
— tiffany (@taylorsantihero) April 16, 2024
Swift’s idea of a tortured poet seems to be somewhere between Emily Dickinson and the sultry black-and-white photo of her on a bed that appears on the album’s cover. The former is the tortured poet of the pop-up, the latter the sexy tortured poet, the one who’s listened to a lot of Lana Del Rey and wants to write songs called “But Daddy I Love Him” and “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”.
While Swift is clearly embracing it, ask any poet how they feel about the term “tortured poet” and you’ll get a different answer. “I think every poet is tortured, but only because they truly understand the ephemera of everything — that’s why we write things down” said Melissa Lozada-Oliva, a poet and host of the Say More podcast. “We look at magnolia trees and feel joy and a profound sadness, because the petals are going to fall to the ground soon. All of us have so little time, and poets know this — and yes, that is tortuous!”
Bradley Trumpfheller, an Austin-based poet and bookseller, finds that being “so in touch with something raw about being alive that it kind of torments you” is what’s “awesome” about being a poet. “The torture comes more from just, I can’t make any money.”
The inability to make money is not something that tortures Swift. Forbes recently declared her a billionaire, the first musician to make it onto the publication’s list “solely based on her songs and performances.” Poets are not exactly known for being flush with cash, especially nowadays, and Swift’s status puts her at odds with the community she’s now claiming to be a part of.
“I think a part of writing poetry is observing things and being honest,” said Alexander. “Can you do that if you have billions of dollars? I find it sort of hard to imagine someone with that many resources being able to get to some sort of truth about the human experience.”
“I also think once you’re a billionaire, you lose access to your soul, which is integral to poetry,” Lozada-Oliva said. She questioned what kind of torture Swift has actually experienced. Lozada-Oliva brought up the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who has spent the Israel-Gaza conflict documenting the horrors of the Israeli attacks on Gaza. “The thing about Taylor is that she’s only known the torture of love, not the torture of being displaced, of forced starvation, or the many unspeakable cruelties we’ve all been witness to [over the last] half-year,” she said. “It will never benefit her empire to really, truly sing about the world.”
All that said, not even poets are impervious to the charms of Taylor Swift. “When I blast ‘Cruel Summer,’ I feel very alive,” said Lozada-Oliva, who also admitted to having “two to four” Swift songs on deck for karaoke.
Alexander, who grew up listening to Swift as a country-music fan in Idaho, cited “Last Kiss” as her favorite, specifically the opening line: “I still remember the look on your face / Lit through the darkness at 1:58.” “The time mark gets me,” she said.
Trumpfheller, whose favorite Swift album is Red, took the bold stance that Swift’s real power isn’t even her pen, but her voice. They pointed to the acoustic version of “State of Grace,” a Red B-side. “There’s nothing in [the lyrics] that if I read it in a poem, I’d be like, Wow, that’s a really good line,” they said. “But there is, especially on the acoustic version, something about the quality of her voice.” On the track, Swift’s voice nearly breaks as she sings, “These are the hands of fate / You’re my Achilles heel,” a part Trumpfheller finds especially moving. “Something about the way she moves from the word ‘fate’ to the next line is just really heartbreaking to me,” they said.
Despite their hang-ups about Swift calling herself a tortured poet, her extremely privileged position in the world, and her occasionally corny vibe, all three poets said they would be listening to the album when it drops on Friday. And who knows? Maybe they’ll all love it so much that they’ll unanimously vote for Swift to keep her spot as the chairman of the tortured-poets department. They might change the name, though.
Related