By Erin Keane, creative nonfiction and poetry faculty
On most days in my role as Chief Content Officer at Salon, where I lead a team of about thirty journalists and producers, my poetry publications take a backseat to journalism. Not so on the day that Taylor Swift—billionaire superstar, award-winning songwriter, muse to millions—released an album titled The Tortured Poets Department. Suddenly, an MFA in poetry became a secret key to unlocking the further mysteries of one of our culture’s most scrutinized contemporary artists. Quick, fire up the poet-signal!
But a close reading of The Tortured Poets Department to decode its poetry references didn’t yield as much intertextual play as one might think. Swift sprinkles literary allusions throughout the album, but she is first and foremost a reader, a scholar even, of her own emotional experience. As department chair, Swift placed herself among the poets, not outside looking in, a stance that probably seems controversial to no one except poets who maintain song lyrics and poems are not the same form. To her fans, the songs are close enough—perhaps because Swift employs metaphor and other literary devices, or her lyrics are perceived as sufficiently imaginative and beautiful—to easily dismiss it as a distinction without a difference.
How, then, does a poet write about The Tortured Poets Department? Because Swift writes in the Confessional tradition, it can be daunting to the uninitiated to discuss her work without a fully annotated memoir in hand. Unless you have workshop experience, that is. For Salon, I wrote about how casual listeners could discuss one of the year’s most talked-about albums without footnotes or fear simply by referring to the “I” in her songs as The Speaker, not Swift herself.
Erin Keane is chief content officer at Salon, author of three collections of poems, and editor of The Louisville Anthology. Her memoir, Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, was named one of NPR’s best books of 2022.