This seminar will convene a chorus of new approaches to the study of poetry and global pop music, sister arts dynamized by dizzying asymmetries. Where and when they are practiced as distinct or differently mediated forms of cultural expression, poetry and popular song are linked by histories both long and recent, by subject matter, by patterns of figural and prosodic design, and by their shared claims to those effects some call “lyric.” At the same time, the trajectories of literary modernism and commercial music refract this common ground beyond recognition. In 1939, Clement Greenberg could decry a self-evident chasm of cultural difference between “a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song.” But of course that difference looks entirely different from the perspective of poets and rock singers in 1970s Poland (Jezinski 2022), the BreakBeat poets of the hip-hop generation (Coval, Lansana, Marshall 2015), reggaeton (Negrón-Muntaner 2009), Sinhala poetry and song (Field 2017), Nigerian hip-hop (Gbogi, 2025), and the music of Taylor Swift (Burt 2025) and Bob Dylan (Chasar 2025)—to invoke a random sample of objects whose conjunctions of verse and pop musical practice demand the conjunction of literary and musicological methods.  

Literary studies is home to a well-established tradition of formalist approaches to poetry and song: pop songs have often solicited the attention of literary critics because comparison with song holds out the pedagogical promise of a broader, more receptive audience for poetry on the page, or else because pop songs furnish an attractive archive to which scholars and students can apply the critical tools developed for that poetry (Booth 1981, Pence 2012, Culler 2015, Bradley 2019, von Hallberg 2023). Other approaches, inspired by developments in sound studies and by the particularizing study of traditions and archives like those listed above, have resulted in an expanding repertoire of methodological categories: “soundworks” (Reed 2021); “stereomodernism” (Jaji 2014), rock and pop’s “literary capital” (Hibbett 2021); “poetic song verse” (Mattison and Suarez, 2021), etc. This seminar seeks to extend this critical ferment. 

We are particularly excited by papers that frame the pop mainstream “as something beyond a scorned other,” to quote the new Oxford Handbook of Pop Music, and that regard “Top 40 music as an increasingly global and self-aware enterprise” (Weisbard 2026). But we are eager to collect a diverse array of objects, histories, and critical and aesthetic traditions, and we warmly invite papers informed by any approach to the intersection of popular music and poetry, poetics, or literary studies. Please direct any questions to [email protected] or [email protected].