P-P-Poetry- That'll Work

I often see and hear people say things like, "Oh, I don't like poetry. I just don't understand it." or "It's boring." Yet, you've probably been wrapped up in poetry your whole life and hear it virtually every day. At least, you do if you're a music lover. While not all poetry can be made into song and not all songs read perfectly as poetry, they are both essentially sewn from the same creative fabric - even if their end presentation isn't quite the same.

Poets and songwriters both look at the rhythm and cadence of the words they are creating. For poets (at the most basic of levels), the words dictate the rhythm based on where the emphasis is placed on syllables, the amount of syllables in a word, and how many words in a line. An example would be the famed iambic pentameter of Shakespearean sonnets.

Here's what Wikipedia says:

An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:
da DUM

The da-DUM of a human heartbeat is the most common example of this rhythm.
A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:
da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

 Poets use a variety of rhythms when writing their thoughts, some based on formulae as with the iambic pentameter, and some using free verse where the rhythm is more organic.

Musicians however, can start first with a song in their head and a rhythm, or with the words. But sometimes (not always) the words are less important than the melody and tune. Some of the most iconic and beloved songs the world has known have no real lyrics of note. Some would even call it bad poetry, but you probably enjoy it more than if you were simply reading it. Here's an example of one such song. (You know you'll be grooving along with it.)

The lyrics?

CHORUS:
Louie Louie, oh no
Me gotta go
Aye-yi-yi-yi, I said
Louie Louie, oh baby
Me gotta go

Fine little girl waits for me
Catch a ship across the sea
Sail that ship about, all alone
Never know if I make it home

source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/onehitwonders/louielouielyrics.html

Not the most earth shattering, and if you read it like a poem, I'm betting you wouldn't be too impressed. 

So what's the point of this whole post? It's perhaps to open people's eyes that one bad poem does not mean all poetry is bad. Perhaps it would have been better had it been used as song lyrics. But there are truly beautiful poems out there. You just have to find the one that strikes a chord with you, has the right rhythm, and speaks right into your heart.

My personal favorites? Perhaps a bit cliche' but I love Edgar Allen Poe and the classic "The Raven", T.S. Elliot's "The Hollow Men", Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice", and Emily Dickenson's ""Hope" Is the thing with feathers".  You can find more great poems here. There are so many great poets of old, and up and coming, that I'd hate for you to miss out on them.

And for one example of perhaps poetry and music colliding, I give you the Alan Parsons Project's version of "A Dream Within a Dream " from the 1976 album, "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" with a narration by Orson Welles. If you're an Edgar Allen Poe fan, you may just want to find the whole album.