Poetry + Lyrics: A Crossover List
If I mention the overlap between poetry and song lyrics, I’m sure you’ll start thinking of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poet’s Department. But I mean it literally. I volunteer as a poetry mentor with multiple programs serving incarcerated people. Sometimes, we talk about poetic elements, but poems seem far away. Lately, we’ve been considering song lyrics and how we can find poetic elements in them.
Once I started thinking about the overlap, I kind of couldn’t stop. There are obvious literary and lyrical overlaps, such as Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith. I’m always looking for ways to get more people to read poetry, especially in April, which is Poetry Month. Why not connect people with poems that echo their favorite bands?
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I put together a few examples of lyrics and poems that are similar. Since so many people experience poetry through more classic forms, they might think all poetry is similar. This short list can be a conversation starter about poetry. It’s a good way to demystify poetry. I’ve included two of my favorite bands, as well as some universally loved song writers, Bruce Springsteen, Noah Kahan, and Joni Mitchell.
My favorite lyricists of my youth were Robert Hunter and Bono. Hunter was a fan of Arthur Rimbaud, the well-known French poet. That comes through in Hunter’s lyrics. Take, for example, China Cat Sunflower’s lines:
Look for awhile at the China Cat Sunflower
Proud-walking jingle in the midnight sun
Copper-dome Bodhi drip a silver kimono
Like a crazy-quilt stargown
Through a dream night wind
Or those to Sunshine Daydream:
Sunshine, daydream, walking in the tall trees, going where the wind goes
Blooming like a red rose, Now come on over sweetly
Ride out singin’, “I got you in the morning sunshine.”
And the opening to Rimbaud’s The Sleeper in the Valley:
C’est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D’argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c’est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.
It is a green hollow where a river sings
Madly catching on the grasses
Silver rags; where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a small valley which bubbles over with rays.
There’s a mostly unknown Allan Ginsberg poem, The Acorn People, that was apparently influenced by the poet’s early 1980s time visiting the band. It’s so different from the longer pieces we usually think of with Ginsburg, here just three short lines.
The Acorn people
Read newspapers
By the kerosene light.
A closer match between Hunter’s lyrics and a beat poet like Ginsberg may be Gary Snyder. Consider this small poem of his and an excerpt from his poem on forest fire fighting, Above Pate Valley:
Hammering a dent out of a bucket
a woodpecker
answers from the woods
Reached the pass, went on
Beyond the white pine groves,
Granite shoulders, to a small
Green meadow watered by the snow,
Edged with Aspen—sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass—obsidian—
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer,….
As for Bono, I loved the lamenting in the lyrics to U2 songs. They felt like someone was crying out the grief of the world, a love song for humanity. Comparing Bono’s lyrics to Seamas Haney poems seems a bit on the nose, as both are Irish writers. However, there are some lovely echoes of Heaney in U2’s songs. Consider the opening lyrics to U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For with the ending of Heaney’s poem Clearances.
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
I have climbed highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run
I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…
…I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet’s differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.
Earlier U2 lyrics, however, do close in on poets like Wendell Berry and Emily Dickinson. They are both known for tight, dense poems. For example, Stories for Boys from U2’s debut album released in 1980, has that dense, compacted feeling present in a lot of poetry, specifically Wendell Berry’s Before Dark.
Stories for Boys
There’s a place I go
And I am far away
There’s a TV show
And I can grow
Sometimes the hero takes me
Sometimes I don’t let go
Hello hello
….
Sometimes the lady takes me
Sometimes I don’t let go
Hello hello
There’s a place I go
And it’s a part of me
There’s a radio
And I will crawl
From the porch at dusk I watched
a kingfisher wild in flight
he could only have made for joy.
He came down the river, splashing
against the water’s dimming face
like a skipped rock, passing
on down out of sight. And still
I could hear the splashes
farther and farther away
as it grew darker. He came back
the same way, dusky as his shadow,
sudden beyond the willows.
The splashes went on out of hearing.
It was dark then. Somewhere
the night had accommodated him
—at the place he was headed for
or where, led by his delight,
he came.
Similarly, elements of Emily Dickinson seem evident in the lyrics to October from the album with the same name, released by U2 in 1981 and Dickinson’s The Sky is low - the Clouds are mean.
October
October and the trees are stripped bare
Of all they wear
What do I care?
October and kingdoms rise
And kingdoms fall
But you go on
And on
The Sky is low—the Clouds are mean
The Sky is low—the Clouds are mean.
A Travelling Flake of Snow
Across a Barn or through a Rut
Debates if it will go—
A Narrow Wind complains all Day
How some one treated him—
Nature, like Us is sometimes caught
Without her Diadem.
Bruce Springsteen is well loved for his lyrics. He’s even been called “a poet of the working class” by Jon Stewart. He’s known for providing his listeners with a sense of dignity, of longing, and providing a voice for the folks left behind. He’s been compared to Walt Whitman as an everyday man’s champion. Similarly, both Springsteen and poet Charles Bukowski can deliver a straight shot of hope into the heart: Springsteen does this in Better Days and Bukowski as well in The Laughing Heart.
Better Days
Well, my soul checked out missing as I sat listening
To the hours and minutes tickin’ away
Yeah, just sittin’ ‘round waitin’ for my life to begin
While it was all just slippin’ away
Well, I’m tired of waitin’ for tomorrow to come
For that train to come roarin’ ‘round the bend
I got a new suit of clothes and a pretty red rose
A woman I can call my friend
These are better days, baby
Yeah, there’s better days shining through
These are better days, baby
Better days with a girl like you….
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
Of course, Springsteen is best known for Born in the USA which depicts how hard life is for the working man (or woman). Ladan Osman, a contemporary poet, also writes with the same gritty specificity as Springsteen in her poem Refusing Eurydice.
Born in the USA
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
End up like a dog that’s been beat too much
‘Til you spend half your life just to cover it up now…
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hands
Send me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
Born in the USA
I was born in the USA
Born in the USA
I was born in the USA
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man said, “Son, if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said, “Son, don’t you understand, now?”.…
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burnin’ down the road
Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.
…
I died chasing the horizon, and got up anyway.
I am here to inherit the earth and everything in it.
I want what every being has a right to,
and then more than that.
I possess one compass, which is my soul,
and it shall never err.
My my voice penetrate
as a steed in battle penetrates an enemy mass.
I have restored myself
and am searching for a green man,
a man who lays leaves as he walks.
I have recovered myself
and am looking for my unborn child,
whom witches ask me to greet.
Joni Mitchell holds a role similar to Bruce Springsteen for her narrative songwriting and her style that is rich in images. Her work lends it self to so many poets, including former Poet Laureate Ada Limon. Take A Case of You, one of Mitchell’s best known songs, and Lover Limon which connect well in these two excerpts.
A Case of You
Just before our love got lost you said
“I am as constant as a northern star”
And I said, “Constantly in the darkness
Where’s that at?
If you want me, I’ll be in the bar”…
Oh, you’re in my blood like holy wine
Oh, you taste so bitter and so sweet
I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you, darling
Still I’d be on my feet
I would still be on my feet…
I remember that time you told me
You said, “Love is touching souls”
Surely, you touched mine
‘Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time
…I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh
in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely
excited for the word lover to come back. Come back
lover, come back to the five and dime. I could
squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,
a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.
I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape
of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt
and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.
Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned
for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.
Noah Kahan, like Joni Mitchell, writes in raw, emotional landscapes and often relies on repetition and fast wordplay. He does so with occasional breaks into light humor. His songs are instantly sing outloud-able. Well established poets such as former Poet Laureate Billy Collins and Galway Kinnell have these same elements in their poems. Kahan’s Stick Season shows these elements in the same way. It’s comparable to Collins’ poem Downpour and Kinnell’s poem Wait. Excerpts of both are below.
Stick Season
As you promised me that I was more than all the miles combined
You must have had yourself a change of heart like halfway through the drive
‘Cause your voice trailed off exactly as you passed my exit sign
You kept on drivin’ straight and left our future to the right
Now I am stuck between my anger and the blame that I can’t face
And memories are somethin’ even smokin’ weed does not replace
And I am terrified of weather ‘cause I see you when it rains
Doc told me to travel, but there’s Covid on the planes
And I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks
And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed
And it’s half my fault, but I just like to play the victim
I’ll drink alcohol ‘til my friends come home for Christmas
And I’ll dream each night of some version of you
That I might not have, but I did not lose
Now you’re tire tracks and one pair of shoes
And I’m split in half, but that’ll have to do
So I thought that if I piled somethin’ good on all my bad
That I could cancel out the darkness I inherited from dad
No, I am no longer funny, ‘cause I miss the way you laugh
You once called me forever, now you still can’t call me back….
Last night we ended up on the couch
trying to remember
all of the friends who had died so far,
and this morning I wrote them down
in alphabetical order
on the flip side of a shopping list
you had left on the kitchen table.
So many of them had been swept away
as if by a hand from the sky,
it was good to recall them,
I was thinking
under the cold lights of a supermarket
as I guided a cart with a wobbly wheel
up and down the long strident aisles.
I was on the lookout for blueberries,
English muffins, linguini, heavy cream,
light bulbs, apples, Canadian bacon,
and whatever else was on the list,
which I managed to keep grocery side up,
until I had passed through the electric doors,
where I stopped to realize,
as I turned the list over,
that I had forgotten Terry O’Shea
as well as the bananas and the bread….
I felt I owed this to Terry,
who was such a strong painter,
for almost forgetting him
and to all the others who had formed
a circle around him on the screen in my head….
…Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
I could go on and on like this forever. If you try using song lyrics to help persuade your friends to read more poetry, let me know how it goes in the comments below. And, of course, if you have any to recommend, let them fly in the comments too.
