Book World: Drake joins the pop-star poetry struggle

"I don't know if I have ever wanted people to buy or support something more in my life," wrote the rapper Drake, announcing the publication of his first poetry collection, co-written with his longtime collaborator Kenza Samir.

People certainly bought the book, called "Titles Ruin Everything: A Stream of Consciousness": Available for purchase only a couple of weeks ago, it has already sold out on the singer's website and that of his publisher, Phaidon.

But, so far, reception has not been especially kind. DJ Khaled posted a somewhat cryptic video of himself seeming equal parts amused and confused as he read select lines aloud from the 168 pages, some of them blank: "I'm not making this up!" In Pitchfork, Samuel Hyland wrote, "Everything in Titles Ruin Everything could have functioned as an Instagram caption, a tweet, a lyric, or, perhaps best of all, a fleeting, unshared thought."

Poet Hanif Abdurraqib summarized the project as "essentially a coffee table book of one-line jokes," while Aris Kian, Houston's poet laureate, called it a "goldmine of mediocre mic drops." (Drake appeared to respond in an Instagram Stories post, brushing them off as "randomly angry poets.") Other writers took to social media to poke fun at the collection - and, in some cases, to jokingly commiserate: "Kind of a relief to learn that even Drake finds it difficult to promote poetry," wrote a fellow Canadian bard.

Drake joins a rich tradition of popular musicians dabbling in verse, with mixed results. (Not to mention the likes of Patti Smith, who pursue writing as essentially a parallel artistic career.) His project seems like a good occasion to revisit some especially memorable efforts from recent decades.

1. 'Tarantula,' by Bob Dylan (1971)

Long before he won the Nobel Prize in literature for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," Dylan published this book of experimental prose and poetry. (In a 2001 interview, he hinted that he did so reluctantly, under pressure from his manager.) Robert Christgau predicted in the New York Times that even if the poems contained "similar gems" as Dylan's songs, the book would become a cult object at best: "The wonderful letters, the funny bits, as well as the dreary, vaguely interesting stuff and the failed doomsday rhetoric - all will go."

2. 'A Night Without Armor,' by Jewel (1998)

When it was published, the pop star's collection - in which she named Dylan Thomas and Charles Bukowski as major influences - became the best-selling poetry book in American history. Some of the reviews were scathing (the book also inspired a full-length parody by Beau Sia), but three poets polled by the Baltimore Sun at the time had split reactions. "I would treat this book quite seriously," said a Johns Hopkins poetry professor. "It's neither naive nor is it trivial, and I suspect it can be read with pleasure."

The author herself was unsparing about her work: "All that poetry was written from 15 to 22 or something," she told Rolling Stone that December. "It's very self-absorbed: 'What is love? What isn't love?' I'm noticing that poetry doesn't seem to interest me anymore."

3. 'Blinking With Fists,' by Billy Corgan (2004)

This collection by the lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins was a commercial hit - "the highest-debuting poetry book on the New York Times bestseller list in more than a decade," The Post reported. Entertainment Weekly deadpanned, "Where are the guitar riffs?" (Some of the poems do scan more like lyrics, with repeated refrains bracketed by parentheses.) Somewhat more kindly, critic Dwight Garner described the book in the New York Times as occasionally laughable but also, at times, "vivid and angular and not much worse than many first books of poems that arrive with heady praise from the poetry world's burghers."

4. 'Orlam,' by PJ Harvey (2022)

The English singer wrote this epic poetic narrative, about a 9-year-old girl growing up in rural west England, at a time when she felt she'd lost her connection with music. The Guardian praised the book for its "exquisite nature poetry": "The words themselves are a lovesome delight: soft and buzzy in mouth and ear (zummer, yoller, whiver, theasom), guttural and crude when needed (maggoty, puxy . . .). The glossary is its own poem." Harvey's literary project ended up inspiring the sonic world of her new album, "I Inside the Old Year Dying," which sets the poetry to music.

5. 'Tears for Water,' by Alicia Keys (2004)

On the heels of her second album, Keys published this collection of lyrics and more than two dozen original poems. A harsh review in Entertainment Weekly ("Serviceable metric patterns are as scarce as vivid images, or signs of shame") was perhaps leavened by a more positive one in Publishers Weekly, which called it a "compelling book of rock ephemera." Keys's poetry is possibly better appreciated off the page: Her performances on Def Poetry and at the Video Music Awards in 2016 were more warmly received.

6. 'Infinity Blues' and 'Hello Sunshine,' by Ryan Adams (2009)

Within a single year, the indie musician published two books with Akashic Press: "Infinity Blues" - a mix of "street verse," "wrong ideas about love" and short fiction - followed by the gentler "Hello Sunshine," a collection that Adams called "his best work yet." A critic for Indy Week suggested that Adams would be better off taking the "crude, mean and unflinching" musings of "Infinity Blues" to Twitter. The Publishers Weekly review of the follow-up called it "more a kind of performative journaling than an attempt at high art." More than a few readers likened Adams's verse to Charles Bukowski's, and not entirely in a complimentary way.