Neohelicon 48: 539—552 (2021) Verbal art across language and culture: Poetry as music Norbert Francis Northern Arizona University Abstract The following proposal for research begins with the observation that in specific contexts of performance poetic language appears to allow for varying degrees of access across language boundaries. This cross-language access, if it can be verified empirically, might be attributed to distinguishing features that differentiate poetic from prosaic discourse, on the one hand, and from musical structure on the other, an important problem in its own right. To approach this research question it is recommended to begin with poetic works as they are performed for a listening audience and to prioritize, at the beginning of the research project, composition and performance from the popular culture, broadly defined, and from the traditional genres of the oral tradition. Another point of reference for this discussion, which follows from the above recommended approach, is the Lerdahl-Jackendoff proposal of analyzing poetry as a kind of musical form. Key terms Cross-cultural poetics, Bilingualism, Hip-hop, Tonality, Oral tradition, Popular culture Introduction: a focus on vernacular art forms Research on theoretical problems in the study of poetic language is enriched with the inclusion of observation cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. Increasingly in an interconnected world, listening audiences today are internally more diverse along these two dimensions; and performances might be able to cross boundaries of language and culture (i.e., actually received) more widely and with greater effect than ever before. Specifically, the phenomenon of cross-language access to works of poetry is the topic of this proposal for further study. How do audiences attend to and appreciate (can they even appreciate) certain sub-genres of poetry composed in a language different from the one they understand? In approaching the question from the fields of poetics and musicology, popular culture should be at the center of the discussion, although, of course, not exclusively. For every example of analysis, researchers need to put aside: (1) their personal preference, and (2) considerations regarding the thematic content of poems and songs. These suggestions are applicable to the study of literature in general; but they bear keeping in mind as we integrate new realms of literary creation into our research program. Considerations (1) and (2) are by all means acceptable, and in many cases interesting, perspectives in the commentary and critique of creative writing. But for the purposes of the present suggestion for future study, the assessment of performance and the underlying competence of participants is best served, for now, with a focus on the patterns of sound. This last recommendation brings us back to the need to focus on popular culture—modern, historical and ancestral. For example, if the only record remaining of an important example has been reduced to its written form, we ask the question: how might it have been recited? The study of poetic traditions and trends today that attain widespread popularity (for example among young people and among