Writing Poems and Songs

by bam

A poem and a song lyric are built out of the same parts: an image, a line, a rhyme that is doing work rather than filling a slot, a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and a shape that turns somewhere. The one difference that matters is that a lyric arrives once, in time, at a tempo the listener does not set and under a melody competing for the same attention, while a poem holds still on a page and can be read again. Almost every piece of craft advice that otherwise sounds arbitrary follows from that asymmetry: why a chorus repeats, why a lyric front-loads its concrete detail, why a poem can afford a sentence a lyric cannot, and why a line break does work in the eye that it cannot do in the air. Six sections work through it. The heard-once constraint and what melody buys and charges. Image and the concrete, starting from Ezra Pound's 1913 instruction to go in fear of abstractions. Sound, where perfect rhyme is a tool and not a rule, and slant rhyme, assonance and consonance are the near relatives worth knowing. Stress and meter, and the thing that exists only in song, which is word stress running against a musical beat. The line, the break, the stanza, the turn, and the verse and chorus. And revision, which is mostly cutting. Every example is a poem you can go and read in full, all of them public domain, each quoted from the edition named at the foot of its lesson. No modern song lyric is quoted anywhere here, because song lyrics are under aggressively enforced copyright: where a song is the right example the technique is described and the song is named. This course teaches the writing and nothing else. It has no advice about publishing, placement, licensing, pitching or getting paid, which is a different subject with a different research burden.