Poets & Pop Songs: Jamila Woods and Patti Smith

There’s long been a connection between pop songs and the literary. This transcends what might be the most obvious example of this: neatly bound volumes of collected or selected lyrics, generally from a songwriter associated with cult or critical acclaim. (A copy of a book assembling Mark Lanegan’s lyrics over the years recently arrived at my apartment.) Some of these fall into the high-culture category: shortly after Bob Dylan’s Nobel win last year, I can recall seeing bookstores giving prominent space to collections of Bob Dylan’s collected lyrics in the same way that they might have had Marilynne Robinson or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o been so honored.

Some volumes that assemble lyrics come with a more overtly literary lineage. In 2015, a revised edition of Patti Smith’s Collected Lyrics was released as a hardcover. Smith is a relatively unique case, however, in that her careers as a writer and as a musician exist somewhat independently from one another. One can imagine someone seeing Smith in concert without ever having read one of her poems; it’s also possible to envision some reclusive poetry devotee who’s followed her work in verse without ever hearing a note of music she’s played or sung.

Smith is one of a handful of figures who falls into this realm; Leonard Cohen, Saul Williams, and her fellow alumnus of the downtown New York music scene…