Poetry is music is poetry

It’s kind of a no-brainer, right? Music and poetry go hand in hand: they are both designed to appeal to the emotions. More precisely, a poet or musician is attempting to manipulate your emotions so that you feel what they want you to feel. Songs, then, are the perfect marriage of melody and words.

But sometimes, one particular line stands out in a way that the original author might not have intended. Let’s take a look at Natalie Diaz’s poem They don’t love you like I love you:

[Read the full poem here]

Now, compare this to the original lyrics from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s song Maps:

[Chorus]
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you
Maps
Wait, they don’t love you like I love you

[Verse 2]
Made off
Don’t stray
My kind’s your kind
I’ll stay the same

[Read the full lyrics or listen to the song]

The two barely seem related; they are telling completely different stories. Something about that one line struck Diaz and took her in a different direction, resulting in a poem that conveys what those particular words mean to her. [Ed’s note: Also read the lyrics or watch the video for Beyonce’s “Hold Up” with the lifted lyric. Same thing, right?]

Let’s make some music

I need the rules.

For September’s poetry slam, we’re going to take a page from Diaz’s songbook: write your own poem using a song lyric that sparks an emotion. How do you do that?

1. Pick a song, any song. It helps if the song is meaningful to you, but if you’re feeling uninspired just turn on the radio, I promise you’ll find one.
2. Pick a line from the song that makes you feel something. A line that you connect with, that resonates. Protip: It doesn’t have to resonate in a way that has anything to do with the rest of the song lyrics. After all, there are people who think that “Every Breath You Take” is a love song. (Sting isn’t one of them.)
3. Examine that feeling without thinking about the rest of the song. What, exactly, do these words mean to you? Why? What else has the same meaning for you?
4. Write a poem using your interpretation of the line, and including the line (as more than just the title). You can write in any poetic form you like, from free verse to villanelle, acrostic to zappai. If you’re stuck for a form, page back through our writing help section and look at past slams!

I need an example.

You probably have the idea, but let’s examine how to approach this with a real-life example. I’m on a cheesy ’80s kick lately, so I’m going to take a line from Patrick Swayze’s song, She’s Like the Wind. Here’s the chorus:

Feel her breath in my face
Her body close to me
Can’t look in her eyes
She’s out of my league
Just a fool to believe
I have anything she needs
She’s like the wind

[Read the full lyrics or listen to the song.]

Personally, I love the line “she’s like the wind.” The image works really well in the context of this song, where Swayze is singing about loving a woman who is impossible to hold onto or even to catch, a woman who is like a force of nature.

When taken out of the context of the song, though, this line means something completely different to me. The wind, to me, symbolizes anticipation. If I were writing a poem using this line, I’d focus on that feeling. I might talk about how the world goes still and silent in that split second leading up to a kiss, or how the sudden rustling of leaves is like the feeling of knowing when someone walks into a room before you see them. My poem would be very different from the song, which is part of the magic of poetry and songs, isn’t it? Each line can mean something, the whole means something together, and you can actually separate and recombine the two.

Is that all?

That’s it!

If you like, you can italicize the words or phrases you borrow from the original song in your poem as Diaz did in the example above. You can also split up the line like she did, as long as the “chunks” of line still have meaning. That is, I couldn’t write my poem as “She’s living in a green house/ like her mother used to / with the table cracked and wind blowing through / the place the screen door used to be.” I could, however, write “She’s like 

Remember to use proper attribution: link to the song you’ve chosen, either by hyperlinking the line(s) you use or providing the URL.

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