Crossroads of Music and Literature

Kelly Baron is Managing Director of Siren Recordings, a sonic poetry label and archive.Andrew DuBois is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Kelly Baron and Andrew DuBois have gifted us a remarkable essay collection that considers song lyrics as literature and in literature. The varied contributors write in distinct voices, yes, and also in distinct keys, time signatures, and frequencies of thought and feeling. Taken together, these essays invite close listening and close reading—often both at once. An indispensable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the poetics of song.

• List of FiguresAbout the Editors and ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroductionKelly Baron and Andrew DuBois (University of Toronto)1. Imagined Audio: Listening to Fictional SoundsKarl Manis (University of Toronto)2. Townes Van Zandt and the Semantic Entanglement of Song and LyricChristopher Birkett (Independent Scholar) and Eric Tyler Powell (University of Ljubljana)3. “I Can’t Even Remember El Paso”: Bob Dylan’s “She’s Your Lover Now” as Literary TextCourt Carney (Stephen F. Austin State University) and Eralda L. Lameborshi (Texas A&M University)4. Blank Verse versus Black Voice: Or, the Problem of the Racialized Reception of Poetry and SongGeorge Elliott Clarke (University of Toronto)5. Paracritical Nas: An (Ill)matic ReadingTrivius Caldwell (United States Military Academy at West Point)6. “Throw Your Hands In The Air”: Wayde Compton’s Turntable Aesthetics as Sonic Wave/Wake WorkMax Karpinski (York University)7. “A Story That Wasn’t in the Words”: Music, Mothering, and Minor FiguresCameron MacDonald (University of Toronto)8. “Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before”: Chicanx Musical Translation and RepetitionDesirée A. Martín (UC Davis)9. Wanton Exhibitions of Spleen: Punk and Post-Punk Dissonance in Word and MelodySue Sorensen (Canadian Mennonite University)10. Beyond “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”: Anti-Fascist Poetics and the Mythologizing of Reagan in 1980s American Hardcore PunkCath Marceau (McGill University)11. Love and Queerness at the End of the World: The Collective Catharsis of Sad Girl MusicRyanne Kap and Amy LeBlanc (University of Calgary)12. The Sound of Speech: The Transition from Singing to Speaking in Musical PerformanceKristine Dizon (Concordia University)13. Pop Goes the Storyworld: Popular Songs for Teaching Narrative TheoryDaniel Aureliano Newman (University of Toronto)14. Estranged: Alien Grammar and the Ace of SpadesRyan Stafford (University of Toronto)Index