Jacksonville

I am absolutely disgusted by some of these posts by users who are under the assumption that Sufjan Stevens is not a poet. I just almost couldn't believe it when I saw them. I wondered "How exactly could you come to this conclusion?" Whatever the premise is, I am simple flabbergasted.

Sufjan is a poet. Rhyme scheme, consistent use of metaphors and symbolism, and adherence to meter aren't necessary in poetry. You would be surprised at how open-ended poetry really is if you were to delve into it further. What is even more ironic is that I can easily pull an example from many songs of his use pertaining to the mechanics of poetry. Take this example from "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!":

Oh, admiration in falling asleep. All of my powers, day after day I can tell you, we swaggered and swayed. Deep in the tower, the prairies below, I can tell you, the telling gets old. Terrible sting and terrible storm, I can tell you the day we were born. My friend is gone. He ran away. I can tell you, I love him each day. Though we have sparred, wrestled and raged I can tell you, I love him each day.

Although the rhyme scheme isn't mapped out, it is obviously there. I plotted the scheme out as such: ABCDEF-CG-EF-HI-EI-JD-EFFFE-D. And there is an attempt of restraint and construction on a syntactic level. I think that this next mechanism is far more telling. Notice his use of syllables in a cohesive format: 5-5-5-4-4/5-5-5-4/5-4/5-4/5-4/5-4/4-4/5-4/4-4-5. Until the last three breaks, it is uni-linear. The last three breaks still show design though, and design in coherence with the preceding. I took my own liberty of separating the lines. The separation indicates his pauses in the song. If you were to double up the lines, you would get results on syntactic and synchronic level that would still indicate construction. I think a formally trained structuralist literary critic could easily show the poetic detail vastly more than I have skimmed this surface. Even though there is obviously construction, lets step into the hypothetical. Even if there the construction was missing, blank verse could always apply.

I think I did this song injustice after taking a second look. Take the rhyme scheme of the first verse:

I'm not afraid of the black man running. He's got it right. He's got a better life coming. I don't care what the captain said. I fold it right at the top of my head. I lost my sight and the state packs in. I follow my heart and it leads me right to Jackson.

This is a too blatant example of his obvious use of rhyme scheme. It is a simple AA-BB-CC rhyme scheme. It is in simple tradition of rhyming couplets.

This album is chock full of lines that have some transcendent aspect. It is too oft for the poet to use notions and allusions that are past human limitation.

Sufjan does have a lot of blank verse poetry, but I think I've elaborated enough on how he is a poet (a brilliant one with a tender and marvelous voice at that). Further discredit towards Sufjan Stevens as a writer, poet, and artist would really just be unjust and, simply, sad.

As for the album itself, it is poetic genius. I think that should be obvious through music critics' praise in reviews and ranking though. That isn't to say that something is good or of worth simply because everyone likes it, but this is precisely what these critics deal with, exacting the aesthetic value within an album. This is a long response. I know. I felt that is was of absolute necessity to run to Sufjan's defense though.