My Journey as a Poet
Although I write a bit of everything now, no medium has motivated me more to be a writer than the beloved art of poetry. My humble beginning of sappy love poems and cheeky witticisms eventually unfurled into more complicated pourings of my soul.
As I focused less on length and “cool” references, I started to contemplate why I wrote, what poetry meant to me, and what would remain after I couldn’t write anymore. Sure, I’d still write a ton of love poems, but with more complex emblems of affection and references that mostly make sense now. Years later, some of my proudest artistic achievements are still my poems.
However, I’ve also embarked on many other creative avenues recently (i.e. this blog), sidelining my poetic experiences. Indeed, I only get to write once or twice a week, a paltry showing compared to my younger self’s output. For many years, I was able to write at least a hundred poems, sometimes even hitting five poems in a single day. But now, I just don't have the time.
Even worse than my poetry writing habits though, is how rarely I read poetry. When I was an English major, I couldn’t avoid poems. It was an honest blessing, as engulfing copious amounts of well-crafted works gradually improved my own.
I loved to incorporate Plath or Shelley into my work, whether it be a slight reference or overt “borrowing.” Sometimes my poems were even responses, combining some intellectual pursuit with whatever strong emotion I was feeling at the time.
But times change, and I get to read poems as often as I get to go to Disney World (not nearly enough). Still, the other night, I stumbled upon something interesting, some artist who I’ve listened to countless times before. That artist is none other than Russian born alternative singer Regina Spektor.
Who is Regina Spektor again?
A personal favorite for years, Spektor is known for experimenting with her immense vocal range and playing piano extremely well. Her sound stretches from familiar genres to strange aesthetics, often combining jazz, rap, and classic styles with a bevy of unorthodox singing techniques.
At this point, I was already well acquainted with Spektor’s discography and had a plethora of favorite tracks on my playlists. But as one of these tracks played, I felt compelled to revisit her work. So, I did, and the musical treasure trove of her catalogue left me mesmerized.
While her unconventional singing engaged me, her playfully creative lyrics fully caught my attention. A few nights later, I sat down, pulled up Genius, and sifted through the lyrics of Spektor's finest songs. After a few hours, it became apparent that Regina Spektor is currently my favorite poet.
The Poetics of Regina
Now, it might be contentious to consider any singer a poet especially considering the numerous backing musicians, technological innovations, and producing tricks that they can implement.
While that would be true for many musicians, that’s never really been Spektor’s style. She’s had producers and instruments, but many of her songs only use piano or guitar. This is especially true for her early work, which included many one take songs with little to no touching up. Even in her later albums, Spektor typically sticks to her piano skills and impressive vocals.
In fact, it’s Spektor’s dedication to vocalizing that truly establishes her as a poet in my eyes. While most poetry is just silently read today, it’s an artform that was always meant to be spoken aloud. Going back centuries, Ancient Greek orators would memorize thousand-line poems before emphatically reciting them for gathering crowds.
There’s nothing wrong with writing poems down today (that’s mostly what I do), but those poems are never actualized until they are lifted from the page and spoken into the air.
But with this reading comes a performance. There are different words to stress, emotions to be strained, and an inherent flow to read along to.
While many great poems have innate guidelines of what to emphasize, many don’t and can be changed dramatically by the reader. It’s a crucial aspect of the artform, which is why poetry slams and readings are vital to the medium’s survival. Only aloud do poems exist.
Even though Spektor mostly sings, there’s a strong level of recitation every time she does so. On her early songs, she maintains an impromptu energy, accentuating her lyrics with a multitude of singing techniques. The scarce amount of backing music also means that many of her songs are perfect fits for poetry slams.
But even in her more produced later work, she always makes it apparent that her best instrument is her voice. Whether it be her guttural vocalizing, her childlike mimicking, or nimble rapping, Spektor has no problem utilizing her voice in distinct and affective ways.
The Duality of Regina's Voice
For instance, one of Spektor’s best vocal exhibitions comes from her sophomore album, Songs. On the song “Lounge,” Spektor spends the first few minutes somberly singing about the dead state many of us are in. She begins with softly spoken vocals that meander through the verses before exploding into the higher end of her range. You’d think Spektor would impress with her wide range for a few more minutes, but she doesn’t.
After proving her capability as a singer, Spektor starts trumpeting a “Brr” noise that sounds like a child blowing raspberries. It’s a jolting choice that’s all the more baffling considering the song’s sullen nature. However, the radical shift is deliberate, thrown in to playfully jostle the listener during a dejected song.
Perhaps it's to ridicule the overt somberness that sad songs often employ or maybe she wants to show the childish naivety many adults never grow out of. Only Spektor herself could say, but the choice to break into a trumpeting of her mouth after devoting so much time to her vocal talent is just one of the subversive ways that Spektor enchants.
The Whimsy of Regina's Words
Yet, Spektor’s odd vocal dances would never be quite as effective without her equally creative lyrics. Afterall, words are the road through a poet's mind.
In Spektor’s mind, that road is always whimsical, often including fantastical elements and specific allusions. She’s never afraid to venture into abstract worlds that seem as nonsensical as they are imaginative.
She loves to tell stories too, focusing on characters or historical figures before deconstructing their lives and examining their humanity. Taking a playfully postmodern approach, Spektor crafts engaging lyrics that are as quirky as they are conceptually brilliant.
Like most poets, much of her subject matter comes from personal experience. Both her upbringing in the Soviet Union and strong Russian heritage spill out into many of her songs. Her breakthrough album Soviet Kitsch explores the culture and terror of living under an indifferent regime, especially on the fan favorite track “Us.”
Her family’s immigration to New York City when she was nine also had great influence on her, as the city’s presence can be felt in many of her songs like “Summer in the City” and “Don’t Leave Me (Ne me quitte pas).”
Both New York and Russia have impacted her lyrics, but she also tends to write about love, death, old vs new, and religion. Combining these subjects with an inventive vocal performance, Spektor delivers some of my favorite poems ever.
Analyzing "Pavlov's Daughter"
As such, I’m going to analyze one of her songs as the poem I feel it is. Somewhat surprisingly, this song comes from Spektor’s debut album 11:11, a self-released CD that just recently made its way to Spotify. Although the album is not as refined as her later work, very few songs ever reach the poetic heights of the audacious “Pavlov’s Daughter.”
A seven-and-a-half-minute epic, “Pavlov’s Daughter” explores how sound affects our lives through four separate vignettes. The title itself even alludes to sound, as Pavlov is synonymous with his noise experiments on dogs, which sculpted the theory of classical conditioning.
1. The First Vignette: A Noisy World
After an intro of humming and heavy bass notes, the first vignette begins by examining a fictionalized Regina’s dissatisfaction with the bustling world around her. She mentions hearing gravediggers outside, who repeatedly beckon her by name.
However, when Regina puts her ear against a boulder to hear them better, it does nothing, leaving her frustrated. She then expresses her irritation with “songs about angels,” implying that there’s an oversaturation of religion in her surrounding culture.
Despite this supposed spirituality, she struggles to hear anything meaningful, leaving her feeling left out. She then threatens to go to Babylon and get herself whiskey, officially rejecting the morality around her.
Because she doesn’t hear the significant noise that everyone else does, Regina becomes frustrated at her own hollowness and chooses cheap depravity. To amplify Regina’s frustration with the hectic world, Spektor raps quickly throughout this part, building to a crescendo where she just wants out.
2. The Second Vignette: A Not So Neighborly Greeting
The next vignette explores a lady named Lucille talking to her neighbor (who might be Regina). Lucille says that she lives downstairs but hears everything the neighbor does, such as taking out the garbage, loving their girlfriend, and even “loving themselves.” Every activity that the individual does, both mundane and personal, is overheard by Lucille, making her an ever-present force in their life.
Lucille then condemns the neighbor by saying, “You don’t sound right” and “You don’t look nice,” which confirms her disdain for Regina. Whether this is the first time they’ve met or not, the sound cues are enough information for Lucille to reject her entirely.
By condemning the neighbor, Lucille asserts herself into a higher class than the neighbor just because of noise. Spektor even switches to a more classic singing style here, stepping into the heights of her vocal range to cement the prude stance of her neighbor.
3. The Third Vignette: A Surreal Interlude
Next, Spektor’s voice shifts to a drawn-out lull for the third vignette, which covers the titular Pavlov’s Daughter trying to get out of bed. She hears the doorbell ring, but doesn’t get up. Instead, she lays there drooling and pondering the surreal state she’s seemingly trapped in.
Spektor’s of course referencing Pavlov’s experiments, which showed that dogs would drool whenever they heard a bell that had become associated with food time.
However, Spektor here supposes that somehow these experiements have conditioned his daughter too. Perhaps she was present during the experiments or has felt the repercussions through some genetic transmission. Either way, Pavlov’s Daughter suffers some sort of generational trauma because of noise. Despite benefiting mankind, Pavlov has socially crippled his daughter, albeit unintentionally.
4. The Final Vignette: The Sound of Nothing
After cycling back through the first two vignettes, Spektor ends with a softly sung outro about an “ambulance stalking out the neighborhood.” They wait to hear their noise cue, someone in an emergency, but never do.
Although this is the best possible night for them, a night where nothing happens and no one gets hurt, they’re also rendered useless. Spektor deems this a “cruel joke,” as their existence hinges on hearing awful things, but if they ever stop, then they’d be obsolete.
It’s a chilling way to end “Pavlov’s Daughter,” suggesting that the absence of sound can be just as effective as its presence. As Spektor eases her voice from soft singing to near whispers, the song ends, and we’re left alone with the ambulance drivers confronting the irony of their own existence.
The Power of Sound
Each vignette explores the social meaning that sound yields, often being powerful enough to derail our lives. Whether we like it or not, sound will always connect us to a larger community.
For Regina, sound links her to a pious world that can’t save her even when she wants to be. For Lucille, sound renders her an unwilling roommate with someone she can’t stand. For Pavlov’s Daughter, sound maintains a detrimental link to her father, while an ambulance’s existence requires sound to survive. Sound fosters relationships we’ve forgotten or neglected, while also ushering the broader world into our living rooms.
Spektor’s final joke is that the song itself, “Pavlov’s Daughter,” can only be experienced, like all songs, through sound. She emphasizes this with a distinct vocal style for each vignette. From rapping to soft humming, every vocal change amplifies the poetry at hand.
She might allow for overlay between sections, but “Pavlov’s Daughter” comes off as an exemplary cacophony of how sound controls us socially. But sound is also the only way Spektor can deliver this message, further cementing how crucial it is from the song’s first note.
Sound isn’t something most people think about often, but Spektor manipulates it constantly with both her vocals and ambitious lyrics. As a poet who understands the power of her words and how they can best be expressed, her venture into the lives of four “characters” reflects how people react and interpret the indifferent soundwaves around them.
The Creativity of Regina's Songs
In addition to being an impressive rumination on sound, “Pavlov’s Daughter” also reflects how creative of a poet Spektor is. By penning not just one but four entire stories about noise cues, Spektor shows how many avenues the human imagination can take us when we let it. She even places herself directly in her imagination for the first vignette, so she can react with the other characters as sound ensnares them.
Spektor’s creativity also rears its head in her fantastic descriptions. At one point, she compares an ambulance to a “tickertape parade over a rainforest.” The bizarre image of excessive celebration over an endangered marvel of nature perfectly captures the ambulance’s irony.
Yet, Spektor’s the most creative, as always, with her voice. It’s her voice after all that makes her such a unique poet, one who understands that how she sings (or says or raps) her lyrics are just as crucial as the words themselves.
I know her incessant guttural stops, radical shifts, and childlike utterances are not for everyone, but to me they’re nothing short of magical. With such a phenomenal voice, Spektor knows that she can do whatever she wants to audibly so that her whimsical lyrics are best brought to life.
In many senses, Spektor understands what the essence of poetry is. Her songs are distinctly stylized stories focused on universal themes and strange characters. Her performances then create these stories, supplying the livelihood poems need and often lack.
Perhaps, her singing and piano disqualify her songs from ever really being poetry. However, as a poet myself, I haven’t found anyone who is more dedicated to the facets of her craft than Spektor. Whether she’s singing, rapping, or blowing raspberries, Spektor’s doing so to tell a viscerally gripping story in ways you’d never imagine.
