Pop songs or poetry: if it involves the word “lyric”, I’m into it. But I’ve never been into song lyrics presented as lyric poetry. When Paul McCartney’s were collected in a gift book, with the help with Paul Muldoon — a poet I admire — I wasn’t even tempted to ask for it for Christmas. And I love The Velvet Underground, but I once passed up the chance to hear Lou Reed give a public reading (I do now slightly regret this).
Yet when I saw that legendary reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson was reading — without a band — at a festival in Lowestoft this month, I booked my train ticket straightaway. On the journey, I browsed the recently-published, long-overdue selection of his clear-eyed prose, Time Come (Picador, 2023), and thought about the difference between songs and poems.
I’m still much more likely to put on a recording of Johnson performing his poems to music than to pick up his Selected Poems, as published by Penguin Classics in 2002. I could listen to the famous dub versions on repeat. But I realise, writing that sentence, that I wouldn’t think of them as songs. They are performances in which a speaking voice meets other instruments with its own music.
This is how Johnson describes the origins of his recording career in the essay “Writing Reggae: Poetry, Popular Culture and Politics” (2010):
I began with the word and was already a published poet in 1977 when I began to make records. The music was not only the vehicle to take my verse to a wider audience but was organic to it, was born of it. Notwithstanding my conceit, I realise that my success in the world of popular music has more to do with the power of reggae music than the power of my verse.
Notwithstanding Johnson’s modesty, the essay goes on to show how the power of his verse is also a musical power: that is, a precise composition of sound as feeling.
It’s clear, in fact, that Johnson has a secure estimate of his own achievement as a poet. The premise of his poem “If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet” is ironic; he’s entirely serious about the literary company (“Chris Okigbo / Derek Walcott / ar T.S. Eliot”) he pretends not to keep :
wid mi riddim
wid mi rime
wid mi ruff base line
wid mi own sense of time
And in “Writing Reggae” he is coldly withering about the “guardians of the canon” who, two decades ago, received the news of his publication by Penguin Classics with scepticism.
The obvious response to Sean O’Brien’s reported remarks — “Art is something made with craft skills. It’s not direct from brain to tongue” — is that Johnson’s craft runs from tongue to brain: he weighs and shapes a way of speaking with the measure of verse. As he remarks in “Riots, Rhyme and Reasons” (2012), an essay reflecting on his “visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society”:
When I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I […] tried to voice our spirit of resistance and defiance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.
The particular success of these poems was noted by the Jamaican Gleaner review of Johnson’s second collection Dread Beat and Blood (Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1975), which included poems in both phonetic and standard English spelling:
Not all Johnson’s verse are written in his native Jamaican dialect, but whenever he does, it is with conviction, born out of a sense of mastery of a style completely his own.
That said, it is a pity that Selected Poems — the only book of Johnson’s verse in print— almost entirely comprises these pieces, and none that reflect his admiration for poets in the Caribbean modernist tradition, such as Aimé Césaire: the anti-colonial prose sequence “John De Crow”, for example (“John flashed his sharp machete of steel slicing a stone in two; his answer been the spark sparking no harder than the stone in two”). We need a Collected Poems.
The style that is “completely his own” demonstrates Johnson’s attunement to what he calls the “tension between Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English, and between those and English” — the tension, that is, between colonial social registers and relationships. In Lowestoft, he read several early pieces, including “Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem)”, a dramatic monologue about police violence that is all the more moving for the delicacy with which the speaker addresses his Jamaican mother from Brixton prison (“Dear Mama, / Good Day”), having accidentally killed a police officer while defending his younger brother:
Mama,
I really did try mi bes,
but nondiles
mi sarry fi tell you seh
poor likkle Jim get arres.
Johnson’s use of end-words that are only rhymes in Sonny’s idiolect is crucial to the emotional effect: this is the voice of a young man trying to translate, formally and informally, what has happened in England for a reader in the Caribbean. It is not actually how Sonny would write (as Johnson sadly jokes when he begins the letter formally with the reply address “Brixtan Prison […] Inglan”): it is how he speaks in his head as he tries to write.
This is high lyric art. “Sonny’s Lettah” might be Paul Celan’s poem as a “message in a bottle”, written in the hope of finding a sympathetic listener. The same poignant hesitancy characterises one of Johnson’s most recent poems, “Reggae fi Mama (Goodnite)” (2020), included in the latest edition of Selected Poems (2022). As far as I know, it has not been set to music. Yet it rides the same, underlying 4/4 rhythm with its rise-and-fall evocation of a woman “siddung pan vahrandah in yu wheelchair” as the sun sets. Here are the last lines:
lite a faid fawce inna di twilite
time a draw near fi seh goodnite
This final couplet blends literary and colloquial tones, as the lyricism of dying light (“a faid fawce”) rhymes with the ritual lilt heard throughout childhood. But who is speaking: child or mother? This is what Johnson says in “Writing Reggae” he aimed at all along as a poet:
To write oral poetry that could hold the interest of the reader as well as the listener. I heard music in language.
NOTES
During the Q&A that followed LKJ’s reading — in which he mentioned he had never been to Lowestoft before — there was a moving comment from a member of the audience: “You may never have been to Lowestoft before, but there’s many of us who have lived in Lowestoft all our lives to whom you have been an inspiration”.
You can hear Johnson reading “Reggae fi Mama (Goodnite)” for the National Library of Jamaica here: https://japoetryarchive.nlj.gov.jm/reggae-fi-mama-or-goodnight-by-linton-kwesi-johnson/
You can watch Johnson performing “Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-Sus)” here. Listen for how the verses to “Mama” stray tentatively over the beat, then fall in hard when describing the police violence (“dem tump him in him belly”):