Is Paul Westerberg a poet?

Kae Tempest | The Comet Is Coming | Kristin Hersh

Songwriters are routinely elevated to the literary realm and The Replacements’ singer Paul Westerberg is one of the finest that emerged in the 80s.

The new deluxe Let It Bleed edition of his band’s 1985 major label debut Tim provides plenty of examples of Westerberg’s trademarked heart-breaking lyrics.

Take ‘Read about your band / In some local page / Didn’t mention your name’ from that album’s ‘Left of the Dial’.

Combined with the song’s music, and the yearning timbre of Westerberg’s voice, it’s easy to find it poetic*. (It’s notoriously static video, perhaps less so.)

But poetry? As a descriptor, it’s usually added to those lyrics we want to elevate to some higher plane, as if simply being great lyrics isn’t enough**.

Having listened to the song over and over again, it’s impossible to divorce the words from the sounds connected to them. I can read them on the page, but in my mind I’m hearing them set to music by The Replacements.

Whether they, or any other song’s lyrics, are poetic in the sense that they could truly live alone within the pages of a book is perhaps too difficult a question to answer. (How could you unhear their musical origins?)

That’s not so say a published book of Westerberg’s lyrics (or some new music) wouldn’t be very welcomed. It’s the route taken by the likes of Lou Reed (Between Thought and Expression), Kristin Hersh (Nerve Endings) and Billy Bragg (A Lover Sings: Selected Lyrics), while Florence Welch took a halfway approach with Useless Magic: Lyrics, Poetry and Sermons.

But when I think about musicians who are actual poets one of the first names that comes to mind is Patti Smith, who was recently writing about poets on Substack. Her dedication to the craft of being a poet of the written word, as distinct from the ‘poetry’ she creates through her music, is something that’s been honed since she published her first poetry collection, Seventh Heaven, in 1972.

We may see similar long term dedication from PJ Harvey, whose second poetry book was last year’s long narrative poem Orlam, though we’ll have to wait and see whether or not Lana Del Rey’s poetry collection Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass is a one off.

Personally, most of my own random poetic discoveries come from my local library and the shortcuts they provide to the modern poetry I don’t generally keep up with.

One of those confused me recently when I found a book by Kae Tempest, who’s clearly aiming for a Patti Smith-like longevity with their craft.

The confusion stemmed from hearing them guest on a track by the London-based jazz/electronic/psychedelic band The Comet Is Coming and having no idea they wrote poetry.

Having just discovered and read their seventh(!) collection, Divisible By Itself and One, it feels a little like thinking Andy Worhol was only a magazine publisher.

Kae won the Ted Hughes Award for their long-form narrative poem Brand New Ancients, has published plays, a novel and a book-length essay as well as their poetry. Oh, and has Mercury Music Prize nominations for the albums Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos, not to mention Ivor Novello nominations for the song writing on The Book of Traps and Lessons.

Much of Divisible by Itself and One is about searching for something, for a place in themselves or in their body or in the world, for a way to move forward. One couplet that particularly struck me was:

‘My breathe is molten glass / And nothing in this life will last’

It’s a line I want to exist on its own. To be read in isolation from sound.

And having waxed poetic for a while I’ll balance that up now with the decidedly unpoetic sound of The Replacements’ ‘Gary Got a Boner’, plus the rest of the ramshackle live tracks from the deluxe version of Tim.

* Westerberg’s certainly inspired by the poetic. The title of his solo song ‘Crackle and Drag’, off 2003’s Come Feel Me Tremble, is taken from the last line of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Edge’

** Obviously, I reserve the right to do just this, perhaps soon, and resort to describing the poetry of someone’s lyrics