Poet Gregory Pardlo, 46, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for “Digest” (Four Way). He spoke with Marc Myers of the Wall Street Journal:

Like everyone else, I’ve been mangling the words to “Bennie and the Jets” for years. My initial attraction to the song was sentimental. When I was 13 in the early ’80s, my mother cleaned our house in Willingboro, N.J., on Sunday mornings with the Elton John single playing.

I remember waking up to the sound of that glorious lone percussive piano chord and the stadium concert crowd before Elton started to sing. I’ve always associated the song, which was originally on Elton’s 1973 album “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” with abundant sunlight and clean-house smells and security. It has authority, and for my mother, I think it was a glam work song, with its steady, pronounced beat and honky-tonk piano.

In our household, where R&B was a staple expressive form, only certain musicians who weren’t black fit into that genre without our questioning it. Elton’s appeal proved that I didn’t have to adhere to strict orthodoxies of our understanding of race and what it’s supposed to sound or look like. That was an exciting concept.

I was particularly drawn to Elton’s stuttering of “Buh-buh-buh Bennie and the Jets” and his slurring of the lyrics. It’s all part of the glittery, rhythmic personality of the song. But the only words that were clear to me then and lingered were, “She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit.”

Later, I looked up Bernie Taupin’s lyrics. There seemed to be a critique of pop culture or the music industry in there, but that was lost on me. The words were more like scatting, with lines that stood out here and there: “Oh Bennie, she’s really keen.” Keen is a double-edged word that Taupin cleverly rhymes with “magazine” two lines later.

It also was fascinating to discover that Bennie is a she, not a he. You realize the song’s lyrics don’t hold the content—that emotion is what communicates. Part of the song’s genius is that, even if you don’t know the words or what they mean, you still sense there’s some kind of crisis going on that Elton is trying to impart. “Bennie and the Jets” is a song I really want to sing along to but can’t. Trying to is still a personal pleasure of mine.

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