Frenemy of Dorothy
Dorothy Parker takes on Taylor Swift, and her pop-up library, with some chagrin.
For those who have spent the past month on a silent retreat, last week marked the release of Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. The record came amidst a blizzard of lit-adjacent marketing, including a library-inspired, Spotify-sponsored pop-up installation at The Grove in Los Angeles. Since every writer alive has already offered comment, perhaps there’s some insight to be found in channeling one from the great beyond. Who better than a lady famed as a pithy tortured poet and torturously witty critic? Here, Tossing Shirts presents some imagined thoughts from Ms. Parker, the best Dorothy outside of Kansas.
I’m a small enough woman to be envious, and a big enough woman to admit it. When I see another writer – a self-styled poet, no less – showered with acclaim and big bucks, it can rankle. Not an attractive reaction, but what’s life without a little ugly now and then? I’m hardly the sort of person who loathes the marriage of art and commerce. Commerce is free to sweep me off my feet any day. I wish it would. On an unbearably brilliant April morning last week, I found myself a guest at just such a wedding – a three-way partnership, deliciously modern. The parties celebrating their successful union: Taylor Swift, Spotify and a perky mob of adoring fans. The ceremony took place not in a church or chintzy reception hall, but on a camera-ready library set smack dab in the middle of Rick Caruso’s Mid-City Xanadu.
The Grove could only exist in Los Angeles. What other city would so lovingly embrace a shopping haven tarted up in Italian piazza drag? There’s a crystal fountain, a trolley and eateries targeting the sort of diners who prefer to pick at their food. And it’s bright, bright, bright, an exhausting tsunami of constant sunshine. Would that Emily Dickinson had visited. Perhaps some Pacific air and a few portable potables would have livened her up a bit. Then again, the sojourn would likely have sent the humble Hermitess of Amherst into a fit of nervous prostration.
It is a place better suited to The Pictures than The Poetry. Verse is a solitary little mistress. She thrives in dark corners and musty walk-up apartments, not a flashy merchandise mecca populated by lithe locals and confused tourists. Has there ever been a member of the ink-stained, scribbling class called poet audacious enough to co-opt such an environment for her own purposes? Not until now. But, hark, I say, we live in an age of wonder and change. And an artist has emerged who fits the bill. A latter-day Edna St. Vincent Millay? Pah! Heiress apparent to Elizabeth Barrett Browning? But no! Only one woman could be so bold as to build a mini-temple to her work in climes like this – that titanic, gigantic romantic: Taylor Alison Swift.
A desire to understand this provocative poet – and the promise of a Swiftian library installation – prompted me to brave The Grove on a horribly sunny April morning. My uncharacteristic early arrival, a full hour before this miniature Alexandria’s opening time, was too late to avoid the purgatory of the dense queue of Miss Swift’s faithful already formed. Conspicuous, I suspect, by my lack of youthful joie de vivre, I caught the attention of a charming young man. This Knight in Shining Spotify Public Relations graciously offered me the one true perk available to the crone-ish critic – a chance to cut the line. Upon doing so, I quickly determined that those endeavoring to disseminate Miss Swift’s message sure know how to arrange a smashing installation. Everything looked lovely, and everyone seemed to be having the grandest of times.
Miss Swift might not be the platonic ideal of the ivory tower-bred, flea market-dwelling elegist. But if some long-ago, heartsick Greek youth could pair a few lyre notes with a couplet or two and call it an ode, then so can a bright young thing with a guitar. She has just released two new albums – The Tortured Poets Department and Anthology. The latter arrived as a surprise, one hinted at to Miss Swift’s fans in a series of inscrutable clues – a madcap cipher whose decryption I will leave to those with more time on this earth. The albums are just the latest in Miss Swift’s recent fast and furious output. Clearly, the woman is unfamiliar with the concept of the idle rich. Money, I fear, is wasted on the overly ambitious.
The Tortured Poets Department. The title alone sends shivers down the spines of the literary set. If Miss Swift is what a writer looks like these days, then a great many of us are quite wanting in the personal-image department. New York’s seedier watering holes are no doubt packed with aspiring Lillians Hellman, downing shots and sniping that no real poet looks like that in a spare, spangly dress. I can practically hear them from across the country. Perhaps Miss Swift, too, has doubts regarding identifying as a poet. “You’re not Dylan Thomas,” she snipes at an ex-lover in a song. “I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Miss Smith apparently found it wonderful to be so referenced. Unfortunately, Mr. Thomas could not be reached for comment.
My own qualms about the album’s title spring not from the “Poets” but from the “Tortured.” I’ve heard tell of Miss Swift’s financials. If that’s what they’re calling torture these days, sign me up. In one song, she mourns, “All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.” Were I blessed with infinite cash and a perpetual stream of handsome beaus, I think Mondays would suit just fine. Absent either, I can’t be certain. But if her songs don’t resonate for me, personally, well, I’m hardly the target audience. I have about as much in common with their creator as I do with a unicorn. Perhaps less.
Some critics deem Miss Swift’s themes too frivolous to be considered poetry. Not I! True, her lyrics dwell not in the realm of the metaphysical, but on the more earthly plain of bad boyfriends, doubters and various enemies, real and imagined. Well, so does most of the genre. If she wants to assume the mantle of poet, have at! Far be it from me to begrudge someone taking a swipe at an ex-paramour in a public forum. Often it’s the only thing driving me to put pen to paper.
Yet Miss Swift’s endless proclamations of torture do work the nerves. To paraphrase, she runs the gamut of interests from “me” to “me.” Quoting oneself is the height of arrogance, but occasionally, needs must. As I once said, “Misfortune, and recited misfortune in the especial, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.” “I cry a lot,” Miss Swift sings, “but I am so productive it’s an art.” I certainly understand the base joys of perpetual complaint. But perhaps less production regarding the crying would render the emotions more potent. There are limits to everything.
The library offered the perfect setting to ruminate on Miss Swift’s many woes. It proved an enclave of curiosity, apparently sprung from some romantic vision of a Victorian bard’s lair – lace-curtains; typewriters preloaded with artificially aged pages of verse; rows and rows of anonymous antiqued books (likely blank inside). Interspersed among these: hardbound volumes titled after Miss Swift’s lyrics. Though unfamiliar with her work, I sussed out the game, as I don’t recall “But Daddy I Love Him” among Shakespeare’s sonnets. Beyond books, the shelf curation bore the trappings of academe – a bust of Artemis here, a terrarium jar of puzzle pieces there. And lest naysayers question the abundant stacked-just-so tambourines, I have it on good authority that Edgar Allan Poe was himself simply mad for a timbrel.
True, this was a library in name only, the whole affair set up to provide Miss Swift’s rabid fans not with books to check out for a week, but with something better. A photograph to cherish forever. And if it riles to watch someone christen herself a poet and then load the stacks with self-celebratory props, that’s just the jealousy talking. Who is this singing siren to swing onto my turf and enjoy so much acclaim? The size of the delighted crowd alone was enough to necessitate a martini or four. Not since Lord Byron has a poet summoned such adoring feminine legions. Scratch that. Mr. Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know could only dream about such ardent devotion from so many members of the fairer sex.
I long ago found that few things improve my mood quite like souring someone else’s from time to time. Yet here, in Miss Swift’s smartly appointed pseudo-library, nothing I could have done to share my acrid discomfort would have tempered the revelers’ glee. Any effort would have been futile. The delight was too potent, the excitement, too heady, the Tortured Poetry, too titillating. I couldn’t rain on their Swift parade. Los Angeles is far too sunny for that.