Is Poetry a Good Way to Practice Lyric Writing?

Dear Internauts,

How ya doin?

The following is a response I posted on Quora.com to the question:

Is poetry a good way to practice lyric writing? (Specifically, writing poems without the construct of a song.)

Yes.


How helpful writing poetry is toward songwriting depends on how willing you are to be purposeful with your practice. Though writing poems for their own sake is great and the more you write the better you may get, it will be even more helpful if you start to deconstruct the poetic aspects of your writing so as to grow your skills, not just your page count.


Simply writing poems—no matter the structural form or even rhyme scheme—can allow you to work on developing your wordplay skills, descriptive imagery, symbolic/metaphorical language, and perhaps most importantly, working on the economy of words and syllables.


Ultimately, writing poetry is a great way to practice lyric writing. Still, if you’d like to be more mindful in that direction.

Here are a few things to consider.


Wordplay - More than just finding rhymes you like or working in a few clever puns (though those can both be great tools to carry over into songwriting), examine the way a phrase sounds by conveying the same idea using different word variations. Don’t worry about melodies at this stage, but still pay attention to how the length of a total phrase, the amount of syllables per word in that phrase, and the comparative lengths of the phrases nearby shape the rhythm of a verse/stanza. Assonance and alliteration are only some of many great poetic tools that can help here as well. The key is how a line flows from one sound to the next. Don’t even worry about a beat so much here, but let your words tell you the rhythm. Whether within a line or at its break or from segment to segment (stanza, verse, whatever…), something should give the reader or listener a sense of a cut or a pause. It can’t be just where a break appears on the page either, because though that works for a lot of written poetry, you should start to get a feel for what breaks feel most natural when the words are audible. Rhymes will stand out like bolded letters no matter how loud or soft or where they fit in the line. Witty and/or poignant hooks either draw too much or too little attention to themselves if their overly emphasized or hidden away, respectively.


Descriptive Imagery: While a lot of the mood in a song is purely in the realm of the musical arrangement, the words can conform to or contrast that mood in ways which can be either helpful or detrimental to your song. Hot take: all the best songs are stories, even if the lyrics don’t tell a story. Whether you’re fighting the man, nursing a broken heart, hitting the dance floor, falling in love, walking along the beach at night, doing the monster mash, or just pacing through a day in your life, there is a world and situation in which you as the writer exist and must in some form embody in order to draw your audience along for the length of the song. In songwriting as well as poetry it can be as blatant as a short story told poetically or a picture painted in emotions, sensations, and ideas. Always, though, you must find a way to connect one idea to the other. If you cannot do that, you cannot connect to the listener. That’s the journey of a story from one verse to the next, with the theme in the chorus, and the twist or exultation in the bridge. Or forget that format entirely and just do what feels right. At this stage, just writing the poetry down, the key is finding a way to connect what you mean with what you’re actually saying. Sometimes that means be as literal as “I hate this town!”, but more often it’s about the way you show us the grit of the street or the glare of the lights or the way the scent of sweat and manure sticks to your clothes even after you leave like regret you can’t shake. It’s rarely about finding the prettiest words or even the best words from a poetic standpoint (because in lyrics the rhythm and sound will matter more), but it is about finding as clear and simple a way as you can to translate what’s in your head and heart into the brainwaves of a stranger. Tough, but with practice you’ll find your own style.


Symbolic language: Honestly, most pop hits are pretty straightforward. Yeah, there’s plenty of gimmicky double entendres, but base an entire song on that and you’ll either have to be very smart or have a great beat to get much mileage out of it. There are always exceptions, but as with imagery, if you want your lyrics to stick with folks beyond simply being catchy, there has to be something they can mentally grab a hold of (though being catchy can get you pretty far). Sometimes the best answer is to just say what you mean as clearly and succinctly as possible. You can use this to great affect in a refrain or chorus, so finding the best way to be the most clear is good practice for that. Again, just like with imagery, going more symbolic can be a great way to paint a picture for the listener. Work on simile’s first, not just telling us why one thing is like the other but really thinking about how and why that’s the case. The more you understand the reasoning behind your comparisons, the more clearly you can convey it to us. When in the course of a song you make such comparisons is key as well. If it’s quick or just for a line, the less obvious (or weirder) the analogy, the more it can affect your rhythm. That’s why the wittiest hooks or rhymes are often saved for the end of a verse or before a pause. Give the listener a second to be affected by what you just dropped on them. If it’s something obvious or more immediate, you can go from saying you’re free like a bird in one line to light like a feather in the next with little pause. If the association asks only a little of us, we’ll be right there with you, but if it is more absurd or obscure (say, free like an armchair to light like a monogram), we may still be trying to process it and miss the next line or two. On the other end of things, there’s the big metaphor, either for the whole piece or a big section of it. This is a style choice, but remember to think about connecting what you mean to you and what it may mean to someone hearing the actual words. And as with everything else, no matter how much you practice your descriptions and analogies, we as listeners will still interpret however we feel like.


Economy of Syllables: You don’t have to wait until you’re trying to match up lyrics to a melody or vice versa to start mastering rhythm. No matter the form or kind of your poetry, consider the pronunciation of words and which syllables are stressed. Yes, singing can allow for some very creative variations on pronunciation that you might get away with. However, whether or not you’re writing for your own voice or someone else’s, it can be extremely helpful to consider clarity from the start. Not only does the line rhyme, but does the syllable count fit with its rhyming pair line in a way that doesn’t make you have to strain to fit everything in your meter. Study Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, or other poetic children’s authors as well as much good rap as you can get your hands on. The giants of hip-hop lyricism are able to get a bit tricky with meter and form because they have a deeply ingrained sense of the most basic syllabic rhythm before they even start a metronome or begin shaping a beat in the studio. Go through your poetry, line by line, as an exercise, and mark the stressed and unstressed syllables. Find the simplest way you can get each thought across per line. Make it sound as tight to the meter and robotic as you can while still saying what you mean to say. Get ruthless with cutting out extraneous words and syllables. Change tenses if you have to. Forget about complete sentences or grammar. As long as it makes your meaning and your rhythm blatantly clear, cut it up. Say it with a metronome like you’re reading shakespeare in fifth grade in front of the class on the day the teacher introduced iambic pentameter. And when you are sick and tired of all this nonsense, set it aside. Go back to working on the more fun, more abstract stuff. Just remember that if it has some kind of clear rhythm when it’s just words, you’ll have at least a foundation for arranging it with the music later on. Melodies don’t need to follow normal syllable accents and can hold out or shorten words in whatever way fits the song, but practicing something more concrete at this stage can mean you have the option to be creative melodically later. You’ll be able to do what you want, knowing you have a basic rhythm behind it all, instead of being stuck having to work melodic gymnastics because of your uncooperative lyrical form.


AND FINALLY: Do whatever you want. Have fun. Be real. Be as form-fitting or free-style as you want. Use your poetry to practice the most important bit of lyricism—genuine expression.

Thanks for reading,

Odist

Digging Out the Wagon Wheel (A Song of Slush and Humidity)

Dear Internauts,

I don't drink coffee. It's not any kind of moral stand or anything. Just never got the taste for it. Sometimes I like the smell. I also kinda like the smell of wood smoke from a bonfire, though I also find it unlikely I'd drink anything that flavor.

Thus, my usual cafe drink is some form of iced tea, often mixed with lemonade. More calories than coffee and less caffeine (apparently, tea has more caffeine before brewing but loses much of it by the time it reaches maximum drinkability). In the winter, I will sometimes get a chai tea latte, but it's usually too thick to feel refreshing. Thanks, probably, to my dad, I'll have iced drinks throughout the year, no matter the weather. One of the strange minor adjustments the few times I've been to europe is that restaurants tended to use less ice in their drinks, many thinking Americans quite odd for our abundance of cubes. Most of the time, ice is used to make sure you get less actual drink with your cup, but such habits are tough to crack.

All this to say, I don't really go to cafes for the liquid refreshment so much as for the destination. Sure, being around a bunch of strangers in a sometimes noisy, sometimes crowded, sometimes hectic environment (though never as bad as, say, the mall or supermarket) can play the fiddle with my nerves, the point is really to be out at all. Leaving my bedroom helps me wake up, but leaving the house entirely is sometimes necessary for forcing my creativity into gear. This too may be a matter of habit formed from practice. Sometimes, thankfully, it can be as simple as taking a walk around the block or a short drive for some thoughts to rearrange inside my mind. Other times, I could travel to the moon and back and still be stuck on a single line.

Sometimes I wonder if my mental illness is truly a symptom of sickness or simply another habit. The further time flies from the inciting trauma, the more it seems like my inability to function at my preferred level is no longer a direct reaction to said trauma but rather a learned pattern of behavior based around the shape in which my brain settled via an evolving set of maladaptive coping mechanisms.

It's like a wagon with one slightly off-balance wheel. Sometimes bumped it the wrong way, busting it too much to run as well but not enough to break it down entirely. Every day the wagon goes up and down the same dirt road, digging in a gradual trench along the wheels' usual tracks. Before too long, the trench begins to direct the path of the wagon more than the wagon shapes the trench. The trench pulls the slightly off-balance wheel deeper into its learned pattern, a little more off each day. Eventually, the trench forces the wheel too far away from the rest. Maybe the wagon gets stuck or maybe the wheel breaks off entirely. Either way, the current damage, while set in motion by an original bump, has been so exacerbated by this trench of repetition, that it could be said the dirt road did far more damage than the bump.

Then again, maybe it wasn't the most solidly built wagon to begin with.

I decided to spend August diving back into songwriting at a more steady pace than I have been so far this summer. It's frustrating how easily I've fallen out of practice with some simple things, needing to rebuild the callouses on my fingers and the old wordsmithing patterns in my head.

On the topic of inspiration, I find myself agreeing with some words I've heard from comedians. The overwhelming glut of socio-political mayhem of the day, which itself was so utterly unexpected in its extent, was to some extent expected to be an outpouring source of material. Instead of being a drinking fountain, though, its like being caught in the garbage disposal. Circling the drain as furious tides pull all sense of straightforward thinking toward an uproarious demise.

Since many of my songs' subject matter is gleaned from social consciousness, from my reactions as an observer of the world and its shifting tides, the large majority of lyrical material I've crafter (or simply expelled) has the delicacy of a scene from South Park, but without any of the wit, humor, or creative experience. The songs with which most folks seem to connect—and often those with which I still feel most connected and eager to continue performing—are those which emphasize more my position as a human in this world versus my position as some distant watcher picking topics off a list.

In his songwriting class, Rick Elias told us many times that the best songs were far more personal, that trying to write a song encompassing the entirety of some archetypal Ur-concept like "man's inhumanity to man" in three and a half minutes was a futile gesture in mediocrity. He didn't say it exactly like that. The idea is essentially that a song isn't meant to be a wikipedia entry. Granted, I took this for me as not writing a song titled "Racism" and trying to capture every side and aspect and historical context with two versus, a chorus, and a bridge, but for many it could also mean that writing a love song about how it feels to be in love has simply been DONE. TO. DEATH. Whether it be Shakespeare or Swift, it's pretty easy to make a worse imitation of something popular than it is to make something unique.

But it doesn't have to be.

Creative folks often have this weird habit of forgetting that originality and a unique perspective are already things we possess. No one else can live your life for you. No one else has walked in your shoes or seen the world through your eyes. Even attempting to walk in someone else's shoes or see the world through their eyes will fail to capture their true human experience while succeeding in revealing something new about yours. Opening ourselves up to new experiences and to other points of view can broaden our compassion and connection with others, as well as our sense of complex selfhood.

This is what great art can do. If it comes from an honest place within the creator, then those who experience it will not only experience something of that place as visitors but a news lens through which to visit the depths of themselves. Thus why collaborative creation can be so astoundingly powerful. A performer can bring their own hopes, fears, doubts, and desires into a piece of music or theatre or poetry or dance which originally came from someone else's experiences of hope, fear, doubt, and desire.

Or, if you're a solo act like myself, each new performance is filtered through the shades and hues of every bit of life I've lived since first writing the song. And it's always great to see what producers or instrumentalists can make with their great talent out of original songs when it comes time to record. There is, of course, more of that on the way. ;)

Thank you for reading,
Odist


P.S. - some suggested great art I've gotten to experience in the past month or so:

Books:

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

Death (collection) by Neil Gaiman

The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas

Fullmetal Alchemist (series) by Hiromu Arakawa

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (series) by Amy Reeder, Brandon Montclare, Natacha Bustos

Movies:

Three Identical Strangers dir. Tim Wardle

Won't You Be My Neighbor dir. Morgan Neville

On Chesil Beach dir. Dominic Cooke

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot dir. Gus Van Sant

Blindspotting dir. Carlos Lopez Estrada

Sorry to Bother You dir. Boots Riley

Mission Impossible: Fallout dir. Christopher McQuarrie

Eighth Grade dir. Bo Burnham