ИСТИНА

The Poetry of Rock, an anthology of 74 song lyrics transcriptions published by Richard Goldstein in 1969, seemed to have set a course for institutionalizing popular music studies under the auspices of literary scholarship. However, the movement never took off in the Western academia: the claims that song lyrics could ever hold up to a standard of ‘real poetry’ where sidetracked by what was later labeled ‘the canon wars,’ a drive to revise and renegotiate the definition of ‘literariness’ that took over top-flight colleges and scholarly communities in both US and Europe. To be profiled as a ‘poet’ was not seen as a privilege; in the words of Philip Furia, “[t]he few lyricists who did publish their lyrics separately made sure no one would accuse them of being a poet.” [1, P. 5] In contrast, it was the anthology Al’ternartiva. Opyt antologii rok-poezii [Alternative: An Attempt at an Anthology of Rock Poetry] edited by P. Bekhtin [2], published a few months before the dissolution of the USSR, that laid the ground for the notion of ‘rock poetry’ that has since become central to academic analysis of song lyrics in the Russian academia.