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What is a poem, if not a song without music?
After reading the poems for last Friday's class, and after discussing what a poem is, I have come up with my own definition of a poem- a song. Clearly songs are comprised of words accompanied by instruments and melodies and sometimes even autotune, but are the lyrics that make up these songs so different from the canonical (or non-canonical) poems that we read in our classes? I personally do not think so. But my opinion is not the defining factor of this definition, so I think I need to back it up a bit. Let's look at Taylor Swift. She has been know to transform the poems she has written into songs, and for her last album, Reputation, Taylor released deluxe versions of her CD that came with a magazine. Each magazine included one of two poems: "The Trick to Holding On" or "If You're Anything Like Me" both written by Swift. She was even quoted in Rolling Stone Magazine as saying, "Poetry is what turned me into a songwriter". Furthermore, artists have pulled inspiration from nursery rhymes too. Take Eminem for example. In his song, "Mockingbird" the rapper sings, "Now hush, little baby, don't you cry/Everything's gonna be alright", Which was clearly pulled from the children's rhyme "Hush, little baby". That is not to say that the musicians are today's version of Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, but it is interesting to see how much poetry has effected their work. The Grammy winners' use of poetry aside, it is not hard to see the similarities between music and poetry. Both are rhythmic, typically very vulnerable from the writer's standpoint, and both must have the correct amount of syllables in the right place or the rhythm is essentially destroyed. Not to mention rhymes, which are commonly used in both poems and songs, are evidently are not a requirement of either. I guess the comparison can be made that not every song is a poem, but all poems are songs in some sense of the word. But then again, even that is hard to tell because the definition of poems and poetry itself is defined by the reader, and although a dictionary might cover the technical definition of what a poem is, it will not describe what each reader sees in or gets from a poem, much like listeners of a song.
After reading the poems for last Friday's class, and after discussing what a poem is, I have come up with my own definition of a poem- a song. Clearly songs are comprised of words accompanied by instruments and melodies and sometimes even autotune, but are the lyrics that make up these songs so different from the canonical (or non-canonical) poems that we read in our classes? I personally do not think so. But my opinion is not the defining factor of this definition, so I think I need to back it up a bit. Let's look at Taylor Swift. She has been know to transform the poems she has written into songs, and for her last album, Reputation, Taylor released deluxe versions of her CD that came with a magazine. Each magazine included one of two poems: "The Trick to Holding On" or "If You're Anything Like Me" both written by Swift. She was even quoted in Rolling Stone Magazine as saying, "Poetry is what turned me into a songwriter". Furthermore, artists have pulled inspiration from nursery rhymes too. Take Eminem for example. In his song, "Mockingbird" the rapper sings, "Now hush, little baby, don't you cry/Everything's gonna be alright", Which was clearly pulled from the children's rhyme "Hush, little baby". That is not to say that the musicians are today's version of Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, but it is interesting to see how much poetry has effected their work. The Grammy winners' use of poetry aside, it is not hard to see the similarities between music and poetry. Both are rhythmic, typically very vulnerable from the writer's standpoint, and both must have the correct amount of syllables in the right place or the rhythm is essentially destroyed. Not to mention rhymes, which are commonly used in both poems and songs, are evidently are not a requirement of either. I guess the comparison can be made that not every song is a poem, but all poems are songs in some sense of the word. But then again, even that is hard to tell because the definition of poems and poetry itself is defined by the reader, and although a dictionary might cover the technical definition of what a poem is, it will not describe what each reader sees in or gets from a poem, much like listeners of a song.
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