Karina Ramos

Lyrics Are Poetry

My experience with poetry started as a very young child listening to my father quote odd verses from some of the stuff that he liked. In general I’ve never had anything against poetry. If anything I’ve always thought having the ability to write poetry was a gift close enough to making a magic spells. And the art of deciphering it was a magic on to itself. In an effort to learn this mysteries art I took a poetry workshop class. There I learned how to start to decipher a poem though the writing of it was still something I kind of avoided for fear of botching it entirely. But now that was taken out of my hand and it came to a do or die scenario. I chose to do.

Dictionary.com defines a lyric as, “the words of a song . . . characterized by or expressing spontaneous, direct feeling.” Whereas lyric poetry is defined as, “having the form and musical quality of a song, and esp. the character of a songlike outpouring of the poet's own thoughts and feelings, as distinguished from epic and dramatic poetry.” If both have song like qualities and a music lyric is the expression of “spontaneous, direct feeling” it stood to reason that writing a poem would just be the putting down of spontaneous feeling.

One of my biggest fear in attempting to write a poem was the rhyming thing. However, the book said that “free verse does not use meter or a regular rhyme scheme” (105). This got me off the hook for having to think of what to write and making it rhyme. So I just started writing.

I’m usually a prose writer and one of the biggest differences between prose and poetry is that in prose you can usually make it as long as you want. However, in poetry the saying “less is more” is practically the golden rule. Being able to paint a full picture with only a frication of the words is a challenge at first but one you start editing the work and getting into the flow of it it almost become subconscious the way you stop thinking in complete sentences and just start concentrating on the “fundamental qualities [of] poetry: greater attention to the sound of words"

So I allowed the music of the words to flow. As I wrote I pained attention as to whether I could feel the poem carrying me away like a good piece of music would. As I wrote I also listened to music without lyrics. I did this for two reasons. If the music already had lyrics that would bleed over to the poem I was trying to write which would prevent me from being as original as I could. Also my listening to music with the same mood as I wanted my poem to have it kept me looking for ideas and words that would fit the mood and sound. This, in convention with the workshop exercises, helped me create my first real piece of poetry.