Members of the Poetry Workshop have been involved in and influenced by music. The influence of popular song is a recurring theme in workshops.
Richard Price writes:
The minute someone like me uses the phrase 'pop music' it shows my age. Would anyone under twenty-five own up to being seriously 'interested' in 'pop'? Pass the cardigan, please. Surely you are not interested in music, music is just part of you and your life. And when 'pop music' was the only music I listened to, 'pop' was simply 'music'. Sub-categories like rock', 'folk', and the further subdivisions of 'dance', were also just 'music'. Sometimes, writing and analysing poetry makes you too subconscious to be able to enjoy some of the consuming qualities of music. Poetry is meant to be slower, more meaning-laden, and generally more sophisticated than the lyric: Robert Lowell can't do The Supremes, and you might well spend more time happily puzzling over a Lowell confession than listening to 'Stop in the Name of Love'. But it'd be the Supremes' Greatest Hits I'd be taking to my desert island before Life Studies.
The world of poetry and of song meet only precariously, and sometimes disastrously. Songwriters who try to be 'poetic' – Elvis Costello, in punning mode, say – too often produce clotted, clumsy pieces of work, where a more straightforward, soulful song – Costello's early song 'Alison' for example – has more power. By the same token, the American poet Richard Wilbur's over-formal lyrics for the musical Candide are perhaps better forgotten.
Poets who are lyrically inclined will probably wish to avoid the thinness of most music lyrics printed on the page, but will still wish to capture a sense of the text being voiced and all but sung. This is one of the riches of poetry: the printed poem is an artefact - there it is, in front of you, in actual space, like a pocket painting - but in most cases it is also capable of being voiced, and some of the rhetorical strategies of song - choruses, rhyme, and the direct appeal, for example - are of course shared with poetry. Lyrical poetry requires a gift for the colloquial, for being able to know how far clichés can be used, and for identifying what in so-called ordinary speech actually carries substantial emotional and even philosophical weight. Song and poetry do not have to play the sterile game of high versus low art; song and poetry do not need academe to say something significant Rather, songs have a direct line to their listener, and need no school or college as middlemen; nor does a reviewing infrastructure control songs' availability as it does with poetry. For me, this is part of the enduring appeal of the lyrics of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker and Mark E. Smith: they go straight into the body off the radio, off the stereo. But what would their texts be without the guitarists and band, and without the nuanced voices themselves? Much less.
Poetry-on-the-page can never supply dense sound itself, but the best lyrical poems provide readers with a sense of the poem being half in that world of song. Robert Burns and Thomas Hardy are obvious examples, in a different way, William Carlos Williams, as well; but poets closer to our time, such as Meg Bateman, also have that gift. In my own work, such as Marks & Sparks, I have tried to use language in the simple yet so affecting way that the best three-minute songs achieve; in other poems, such as 'Club mix', I have foregrounded rhythm, increased the pace, and pushed narrative content back. The effect is I think to approach near-abstraction, or, rather, to approach a state where the poem as it is read has become a musical instrument rather than a human voice alone. A story is still being told - poets can't leave language behind - but in conditions where those "conditions" are very much part of the story.