You’re officially in the rabbithole, but you may still be unsure, tentative, concerned. Do you feel your grip on reality loosening? Are you sure it’s not tightening, getting clearer?
Welcome to Day 2 of Poetry Camp. (Missed Day 1? Here you go.)
You’ve been initiated into the vast and expansive world of poetry. You’ve read your first poem (or your second or third or thousandth), or listened to it, and if you’re lucky, you really felt it.
But do you know what you’re reading? You may have felt a spark, but that spark alone isn’t enough if you feel so lost you end up more disoriented and confused, like travelling to a foreign city and fumbling your way through with no sense of security, more caution than adventure.
You need to know what a poem is, something we’ve been skirting around.
In order to get there, settle around for story time.
Once upon a time a few years ago, Insta-poets turned what had always been a slow and steady evolution of literary form into a swift internet-age update led mostly by young women, so quick and so furious the onslaught that a small group of onlookers came to think of this evolution as a tumour to the real craft of poetry.
But poetry was like everything else, a reflection of the times and a device that does exactly what it needs to in that moment in time, for whomever has the fortitude to use it. And young women, who previous to this point in history, had never really had much of a voice at all, now had the beautiful thing called the internet to do it. The truth wasn’t out there; it was spread byte by byte.
Fact: Poetry was technically invented before written literature. It was an oral art form, just a way to “record” information and pass it on, which people needed a lot of help with before the printing press was invented. And when that happened a few hundred years ago, we no longer had to memorize important data requiring the sound devices of rhythm and rhyme to help things stick.
This is why rhyme is no longer a defining quality of poetry; we are rarely required to memorize anything with the advent of the internet age and all information available not just in books but now at our fingertips.
It’s not just because some poetry god said so.
But as more inventions came along to “do the job better”, poetry’s importance in society went to zilch.
Now we all consume “poetry”, or what was once considered the point of poetry, as music, as novels, as movies, as an endless stream of information. You could say, as we tend to do and as tends to happen, that poetry was effectively democratized over the centuries.
Poetry poetry? Just some staid, old thing that can’t keep up—or is it?
People don’t usually think about poetry and technology in the same breath, but they’re intrinsically linked. Poetry’s form was and continues to be informed by technology.
And technology’s pattern and purpose over time is not just to make our needs and wants more convenient but our worlds more immersive. I don’t mean the metaverse—or not just that, at least. All it means is something that feels less like you’re separated, viewing, observing but in it, living it, experiencing it.
And even though that’s how it’s always been, we have always resisted new technology because we hold onto what we know. Like when movies with sound were invented, “the talkies”, and many considered it a fad:
“Talking doesn’t belong in pictures.”
“I don’t think people will want talking pictures long.”
“A box-office gimmick.”
“The noise would simply drive audiences from the theatres.”
Right now we’re living in a boom towards the immersive: Photography, then movies and TV, then home video, then Youtube and TikTok and everyone else trying to be Youtube and TikTok. As technology increased our capacity to view and make video, it became our most consumed type of content. It gets us closest and fastest to what technology has always been on the path to do.
Not that I’m forecasting the death of books, but where we are now, I have to ask: If I can watch a short video, why should I read it?
I love movies and tv and yes, even TikTok, but I’m very aware that with the power the most convenient forms of media hold over me, it’s very possible that one day, I’ll have the imagined be something that’s only fed to me instead of something I do for myself.
Words will always be words that require the extra effort of imagination to turn into sentences into pictures into stories.
And that’s exactly it.
Imagination is like a muscle, and I don’t just mean imagination in the epic-fantasy, childhood dreams kind of way. I mean the ability to stretch, to wear other shoes, to think outside boxes, to orient your attention towards wonder.
Poems are, conveniently, usually quite short. That’s because other literary forms were invented that could do better jobs of conveying information and telling stories. Poetry evolved into a form best for quick hits, little magic attention pills that make your imagination work a little to get there.
Except, oh right, so many of us don’t want to work a little to get there. Not that we really don’t want to, more that we’re so used to hyper frictionless convenience and more, more, more on demand that any other way seems foreign.
Good thing we already have something that bridges that gap between immersion and imagination, and I know you already know it well: Music.
As you may have already noticed from your Day 1 Reading List, poetry is not limited to a certain kind of media. A poem can be a movie. (See: Beowulf and Mulan.) A poem can be a video. And a poem can be a song.
Music and poetry have a lot in common. Both have existed for a very, very long time. And both tap deeply into something unexplainable, connect us to the current of the world. They, also, as you may have clued into from yesterday’s assignment, have a lot to do with sound. You think that all the pleasure comes from knowing, from being able to see the picture that the poem paints, but that’s just one part of it. Part of the pleasure is the pure sensation of sound. So if you’re into music, poetry isn’t that far away.
Pop music, which mostly aims for accessibility and mainstream appeal, could just be your way into the mostly oddly inaccessible art of poetry.
Who’s leading the charge? A lot of them women, an entire half the population, and the other long underrepresented, whether for gender, race, class, who have something to say other than he loves me, he loves me not, the formerly voiceless who have now woken up and chosen violets. (If you’ve ever wondered where the name Violets comes from, the recurring hold it has on poets starting from “Roses are red, violets…” is one of them.)
Exhibit A: Some of the most powerful, successful, and respected artists in music across every genre, who’ve collectively captured the hearts of millions of people worldwide to the tune of billions in dollars, have either written poetry or collaborated with poets for some of their most celebrated work. If that’s a sign of anything, it might just be that poetry is making its comeback not because it’s the only way and therefore the default, but in the midst of every way, everywhere, at once, poetry says something in a way that no other medium quite can, opens up a part of you in a way that nothing else can.
And with that, I present to you Exhibit B: Today’s assignment and reading list, focused on poetry and music—and just maybe your way in.
Camp Assignment #2: Listen Closely
Seat, comfortable? Headphones, on?
Your assignment today is to go through your Spotify playlist, find your favorite songs, and listen closely to the lyrics.
Try an acoustic version or pull up the lyrics and read them as you listen. What lyrics give you tingles? What about shivers and goosebumps? What songs, after listening to them on repeat, still do those things to you? Maybe make a playlist full of your favorite lyrics. Consider that your portal into poetry. Let rhythm and melody tease you into wanting more.
And then head to today’s reading (listening?) list—or feel free to skip straight to it.
Today’s Poetry “Reading” List
Speaking of violets, let’s start with Lana Del Rey. In 2020, she released a poetry book called Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass along with a spoken word album [Spotify | Lyrics] of the same name. And yes, I’ve read it. And yes, coming soon to a Sunday issue near you. Other notable musicians-slash-poets: Halsey with I Would Leave Me If I Could, Jhené Aiko with 2Fish, and Florence Welch with Useless Magic.
In 2018, Kendrick Lamar became the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for his album, DAMN [Spotify | Lyrics]. Some favorite snippets from reviews: “jab[s] mercilessly like a sewing machine” (Pitchfork), “a dazzling display of showy rhyme skills, consciousness-raising political screeds, self-examination and bass-crazy-kicking” (Rolling Stone), “His catalog is filled with parables and morals and lamentations, forms of storytelling that compress people and experiences into neat, digestible lessons. On Damn, these experiences and people—Kendrick included—are permitted their flaws, lusting and loathing and shit-talking and all the other things humans do” (Complex).
Speaking of rap music, this blog post is a deep dive into the poetic elements of Eminem’s lyrics and songwriting, perhaps most closely aligned with traditional poetic form than anyone else on this list. For a taste of his classics: Stan [Spotify | Lyrics] and Lose Yourself [Spotify | Lyrics]. Fact: Eminem came out on top in a study of recording artists with the best vocabularies.
Also: Speaking of Pulitzer prize winners, Bob Dylan [Spotify | Lyrics] has one too, for his “lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power”. (Bob Dylan also came out as one of the top five musicians with the best vocabularies in the aforementioned list.) Bonus: This article, investigating the neuroscience of Bob Dylan’s genius, which makes a case for poetic form not as a gatekeeping act but as an accelerant to creativity.
A list of poetic lyrics isn’t complete without Taylor Swift, whose music is synonymous with songwriting and who almost singlehandedly supplanted the genre of pop that came before, of songs written by other people, about things other people think young women think and care about. I love this Reddit thread comparing her lyrics to the way “normal people” talk. Fans laud Folklore and Evermore as her best lyrical albums, but as a colour fiend, I have a soft spot for the cinematic-like universe Taylor has created in the songs Red [Spotify | Lyrics] and Maroon [Spotify | Lyrics], released a decade apart. Taylor herself won a national poetry contest at age ten and has since very sporadically released poems, this one as an interlude during her Reputation tour. See also: Taylor Swift as Books, my new favourite Instagram account, and this Taylor Swift or Robert Frost teaching activity for high schoolers—and Tupac or Shakespeare, Queen or Emily Dickinson, and Green Day or Walt Whitman.
Speaking of Tupac, The Rose That Grew From Concrete is a collection of 72 of his poems written from the time he was 19 until his murder. And Sonia Sanchez wrote this poem, For Tupac Amaru Shakur.
Just as musicians and songwriters pull from poetry’s repertoire, poets draw inspiration from music. And there seems to be something in the (Frank) ocean. (No comment on Coachella.) After reading Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo, I discovered another poetry collection, also inspired by Frank Ocean, with his name also in the title. And then another. Shayla Lawson’s I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean (two poems, Street Fighter and Songs for Women, here) and Alan Chazaro’s This is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (sample pages here). Brand new to Frank? Try Swim Good [Spotify | Lyrics]. So, why all the poetic fanfare for Frank? I like how this article put it: Frank will weave together very literal moments with seemingly bombastic, though fitting, imagery. These events are usually things we have experienced or could experience on our own, but he takes advantage of his imagination to paint them with his own colors. The colors appear so strong (or vague, depending on your interpretation), that they can be mistaken for huge ambiguities in the middle of what you assumed was a clear and obvious palette of thought.
Tracy K. Smith’s Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes? is from her poetry collection, Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Life on Mars, of course, borrows its name from David Bowie’s 1973 song [Spotify | Lyrics]. Both stunning, surreal, spacey.
Beyonce and Rihanna both invited poets to contribute to some of their most seminal work. For Lemonade [Spotify | Lyrics], Beyonce collaborated with Warsan Shire who wrote Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, adapting several of her poems into her visual album. For Anti [Spotify | Lyrics], Rihanna collaborated with Chloe Mitchell to insert five Braille poems into the cover art, for people “who are blind to experience an entire album by touch”.
And then there was the last one, for today: This list (plus more songs with poetic lyrics) can be found in the Poetry Camp Mixtape.
See you tomorrow for Day 3.