i’ve been reading and copying out Taylor Swift’s lyrics for the past few months and trying to treat them like poetry, but in order to do that I have to treat a set of words as a different sort of words. The shift in in genre, in this case, must be associated to the removal of singing. A poem can still be a poem without music. As ever though, I will begin by consulting the OED.
Lyric:
1. Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung; pertaining to or characteristic of song. Now used as the name for short poems (whether or not intended to be sung), usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and directly expressing the poet’s own thoughts and sentiments. Hence, applied to the poet who composes such poems. lyric drama, lyric stage, the opera.
2. Of persons: Given to song; singing-. poet.
4. The words of a popular song
Poem:
1. A piece of writing or an oral composition, often characterized by a metrical structure, in which the expression of feelings, ideas, etc., is typically given intensity or flavour by distinctive diction, rhythm, imagery, etc.; a composition in poetry or verse.
The first piece of overlap can be noted within lyric where it mentions that a short poem can be called a lyric. Going into the definitons I had also believed that lyric might have something in common with limerick but was wrong about that. The etymologies of the two also pointed to a difference. Lyric is derived from “Lyre” (lyre, pants on fyre), and poem is from the Greek “to make,” and only attributed to the making of art rooted in words and (resembling) literature later on. The other note I will make is that I have recorded definitions 1, 2 and 4 from lyric because 3 was really only the thing produced by 2 (a poem). When it came to Poem, all the following definitions (note that in the OED, it is not really the strict definitions of words but a record of their usage within and over time) seemed to be captured by either the first or by the etymology. The treatment of a person as a lyric is also interesting, just as interesting to me as separating the genius from the body. So it is possible to take the lyrics, transform them into poems and identify Taylor Swift as the lyric, thereby maintaining a lingual link to where we started.
What seems to be the common thread between the two is obviously composition of syntax and language into an art form but they split in their usage. If you sing a poem it becomes lyrics and if you strip lyrics of their melody you have a poem. Both of these things have their own qualities when it comes to Taylor Swift though, and I believe she is aware of this. In Holy Ground she mentions, “you fit in my poems like a perfect rhyme.” I have trouble believing she is referring to anything that isn’t her music. This means that her poems, if her lyrics are treated as such, take on very specific qualities that are adapted from their performance as song. The most notable is the repetitive chorus. Initially, when I started writing out the lyrics into poetry I didn’t want to repeat the chorus and the labour in writing it repetitively and worked around it by putting a star next to the first chorus and writing a star in wherever the next ones would land. After a while I stopped doing that and would just write the song through without indicating which part was the chorus and just wrote out all the words as they appeared in the lyric booklets, which presented three new interesting qualities in the translation from lyrics to poetry. First, it meant that in not acknowledging the chorus it became a part of the poem that may be alluded to at other parts but is otherwise just another stanza. Second, when lyrics that were formatted with slashes to indicate where the breaks in lines were, I removed the lines and would just write out the block of text into a prose poem. Lastly, it made the poems which had a chorus that changed each time (and therefore required writing out again with the small changes) thrive on a very specific repetition of a few phrases: a leitmotif. This all makes for a very different reading of these. Mostly, it makes them less arduous to read as they lack the music that makes them bearable to hear several times. I will also to admit to being guilty of omitting the bits at the end of a song that contain parts of the chorus or the bridge and repeat them in a way that’s different enough that it isn’t necessary to hear it over and over again. I am inconsistent though, and would keep it whenever I felt added enough stress to a trauma of my own.
A second political question when it came to omissions was what to do with all the words that weren’t really words but contained in the lyrics. I kept all the “oh”s; after all, Shakespeare used those for additional syllables and can be bent in all sorts of ways to all sorts of emotions. In another, I did omit the word “whoa” because it became a block that entirely interrupted the flow of a poem even though when it was sung it could be inserted into the melody fairly easily and pleasantly.
Overall it really was just a means to sort my thoughts and give more importance to the words than the music. It was just strange to find that it wasn’t a simple transition and that it actually meant a form of editing to make a comfortable translation into another genre. The content within this genre begs for its own analysis.
the gift and the grain 