IS SMOKEY ROBINSON A POET?

Smokey Robinson

The minds of readers or listeners receive words from songs and poems as they will. To my mind, the context of the work in which the words appear doesn’t matter all that much. 

The fact that Bob Dylan writes songs rather than poems was held against him by opponents of his being chosen as the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. But how different is the frisson of listening to “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Visions of Johanna” from that of reading “Sailing to Byzantium” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”?  

More importantly, does drawing a strict boundary between the work of songwriters and that of poets contribute to the pleasure one gets out of a song or poem—or does it interfere with it?

Such thoughts stirred in me recently after listening to “My Guy” for maybe the thousandth time. Composed by William “Smokey” Robinson and sung sublimely by Mary Wells, the song was released in 1964 and reached number 1 on the U.S. charts and the same peak in this boy’s heart. (I love this raw and lovely video of Mary singing the song, apparently shot near a pond in New York City’s Central Park.)

I wouldn’t go nearly as far as characterizing Smokey as “America’s greatest living poet,” as Dylan was apparently falsely said to have done many decades ago (although he is widely thought to have considered Smokey’s lyrics to be “poetical”). But Smokey’s words, even apart from the music, have delighted me since before the release of “My Guy.” 

And yet, I would never dub him a poet. Such a statement would risk bringing down upon his delicate lyrics a landslide of inapplicable literary-critical debris. And yet there is much about the man’s lyrics that is purely lyrical in the best poetic sense. He excels in clarity, metaphorical thinking, consistency, tender emotion, and wit. His rhymes are often gossamer: Note the delicate feminine off-rhyme of “Like birds of a feather we stick together” in “My Guy.”

The lyric of the song reveals Smokey’s facility with figures of speech. From his very first line, “Nothing you can say can tear me away,” the songwriter extends the metaphor of the adhesiveness of lovers—and pleasurably sticks to it all the way through. In many of his songs, Smokey excels in this stretching of likenesses between very different things, a figure of speech scholars of Metaphysical poetry call a “conceit.” 

In the second stanza, the conceit of lovers being as inseparable as other sets of things proceeds delightfully from stationery (“sticking to my guy like a stamp to a letter”) to nature cliche (“Like birds of a feather we stick together”) to a curiously emotional item of clothing (“I can't be torn apart from my guy”). These mundane items, expressed in such colloquial language, make a fine kind of contrast to the romanticism of the emotion being expressed. It is a high form of love, faintly courtly, eternally faithful, never untrue.

It would be an unwelcome intrusion to insert a conclusion here to the effect that Smokey Robinson’s lyrics either are or aren’t poetry. That would be, as a logician might put it, a distinction without a difference. Let me just say, as a matter of opinion, lyrics like “My Guy” are the cream of the crop.

PHOTO CREDIT: "Smokey Robinson" by Camlin Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.