This article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity. I trace a long-standing mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality. What we have lost as a result of this undue insistence on mediation is an awareness of the two-way traffic between life and lyrical craft. A poetics of song should pay increased attention to this intricate relationship – not reducing lyrics to biographical contingencies, but rather viewing autobiography itself as a complex process of self-reading, a public act of autobiographical making. My argument is illustrated with reference to three contemporary singer-songwriters who have interpreted aspects of their lives through song: Vic Chesnutt, Sun Kil Moon (Mark Kozelek) and Anohni (formerly of Antony and the Johnsons). Their work ultimately traverses and obscures the interstices between experience and imagination.

中文翻译：

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流行歌曲与经验诗学

本文认为，歌曲创作可以是一种自传活动。我通过一个专注于表演和拟人化的学术分支来追溯流行音乐中长期以来对自我表达的不信任，展示了它与后结构主义和现代主义非人格化梦想的潜在联系。由于过度坚持调解，我们失去的是对生活和抒情技巧之间双向交流的认识。歌曲的诗学应该更加关注这种错综复杂的关系——不要将歌词简化为传记的偶然性，而是将自传本身视为一个复杂的自我阅读过程，一种自传制作的公共行为。我的论点通过三位当代创作歌手来说明，他们通过歌曲诠释了他们生活的方方面面：Vic Chesnutt、Sun Kil Moon (Mark Kozelek) 和 Anohni (以前属于 Antony and Johnsons)。他们的作品最终穿越并模糊了经验和想象之间的缝隙。