Pop music fans who wanted poetry were far more likely to find it in hip-hop than rock music. Anyone after Patti Smith was either a) nowhere near the mainstream, like Vic Chesnutt or Neko Case, or b) a cut-up surrealist, like Michael Stipe or Beck or Stephen Malkmus, more in love with the sound of language than its content. Though Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell wrote poetry and ran in rock circles, no one would argue they made rock music, no matter how many rock musicians they influenced. The exceptions are rare: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith. Rock ’n’ roll culture in particular doesn’t want to know what poets are doing. Like music, you need to explore a little to find poets whose work speaks to you, and then you have a lifelong friend who’ll tell you truths you didn’t know you knew.” Poetry isn’t these things-or if it is, you’re reading the wrong stuff. Novelist David Mitchell says, “Too many people think it’s an elitist pastime, like polo or twee verse or brain-bruising verbal Sudoku. The chorus quickly became a cliché referenced countless times in headlines and stories about Downie and/or other lyricists and poets. “Poets” is one of the most straight-ahead, Stonesy rock songs in the Hip’s catalogue, with nothing remotely abstract in the music that might deter people suspicious of poetry. The first track on Phantom Power features the tongue-in-cheek chorus, the one that so concerned the two young poets in question. “It goes, ‘Don’t tell me what the poets are doing.’” “Uh oh.”īoth those poets, Ken Babstock and David O’Meara, were Hip fans and got to know Gord Downie in the coming years-they were even referenced in his lyrics. “Did you hear the new Tragically Hip single?” “No, why?” Two young Canadian poets, one in Ottawa and one in Toronto, were talking on the phone in 1998. A rock star with a poetry book? Yeah, right-why don’t we just give Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature.
To that crowd, Downie’s work may have been a curiosity at best. But his book was not nominated-that would have been quite a coup, for a writer’s first book to take a place beside Anne Carson and Don McKay on a shortlist. Coke Machine Glow came out the same year as the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the richest literary awards in the world, presented every year to one Canadian and one international poet. What was this big rock star doing slumming with literary company equally revered and reviled, in the least commercial literary medium possible? What does a songwriter know about poetry? Isn’t it a completely different medium? Didn’t Jim Morrison ruin this for everyone?īut Gord Downie was hardly a pariah among poets. Poets were feeling particularly sensitive to this news: it had been only three years since pop star Jewel released her first and only book of poetry, which was also a bestseller, despite scathing reviews. When they were put on sale separately, the book sold another 10,000 copies, a total that exceeded sales for Michael Ondaatje’s then most recent collection, 1998’s Handwriting. For the first two weeks both were on sale, they were available only as a bundle-and they sold 10,000 copies in 36 hours. That he simultaneously released a book of poetry, with the same title and cover design, was something else entirely. That the singer in the Tragically Hip had put out a solo record was newsworthy enough. An excerpt:Ĭoke Machine Glow, Gord Downie’s first solo album, confounded many people when it came out in 2001. While telling the story of Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip in his new book, The Never-Ending Present, author Michael Barclay also looks at the social and cultural influences that shaped the quintessentially Canadian band and its singer, who died of brain cancer in October 2017.
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