Poetry
by Stanley Chris
You almost certainly did poetry at some point in your education, at whatever level. I have been a lover of poetry since it first got introduced to me during my school years. It was my most favorite section in the English examinations, despite being unusually hard to score at on certain occasions.
That love for poetry has stayed with me since, and largely informed my venture into songwriting. The first songs I ever wrote were gotten from putting melody to some of the poems I had been writing, and it all began with noticing how married poetry and music are. As stated in a previous blog, a song is simply a poem wrapped in melody. More on melody later; for now, let's focus on a few vital aspects of poetry that would be of immediate help to you.
1. Rhyme
Rhyme! Rhyme! Rhyme!
This is where your song takes off to the sky or falls six feet deep! When I first started out, I didn't pay as much attention as I do now to this, but from the time I realized how integral it is to making a good song, I have since went back and fixed the rhymes for all the songs I had written that didn't accord it the diligence it demands.
Rhymes can be developed in different ways, and sometimes you might not be able to apply it consistently everywhere in the song. Nevertheless, it has to come out in every place that you can have it. There are different kinds of rhymes: full rhyme, half rhyme, end rhyme, near rhyme, etc. You should familiarize yourself with them and see how they are applied as you study different song lyrics which, like we stated before, is still the best way to learn songwriting techniques; find songs that you resonate with, and that you'd like to emulate, and use them as your model to pattern your work after. This does not mean that you write about the same things; you are simply learning techniques you can use to tell your own story and to give your own individual expression.
2. Alliteration
Next to rhyme, the other very powerful tool is alliteration. Again, this is another thing that I began to pay more attention to several songs into my writing journey, given that I was learning writing by writing, and studying other people's songs. When I noticed how effectively it works in making a song stand out, I have employed it in every song and in every place where I can.
Alliteration is simply the repetition of similar or nearly similar sounds in quick succession. "Take time to tour the town" is an easy example, the repeated sound being "T". This device makes the song more accessible, and thus very easy to remember. It often leaves the song playing in the background of your subconscious mind, and when it pops back up to your consciousness, you are immediately drawn to opening your Playlist and having another listen at the song because it has such an irresistible pull on you. It's the reason a lot of people would effortlessly remember J. F. Kennedy's famous line "The princes of privilege".
3. Imagery
Imagery is one of those things that add to the artistic quality of your work. By using these pictures, which are often familiar with the vast majority of your audience, especially when you use either conventional images or very practical every-day applications, you are able to paint the ideas expressed in your song on the walls of the minds of your listeners, like the pieces of art they have as wallpapers in their phones or homes or offices. "You swept me off my feet" is a sufficiently provocative line, but "You swept me off my feet like a violent flood" is a stronger one, being reinforced by the image of a flood, which makes it quickly registered in the mind, and very difficult to lose.
4. Adjectives
That gets us to this next point, which is not necessarily a poetic device but a linguistic one, yet is just as helpful as the others. Don't forget that you are essentially using language to create your work. Let's look at that first line again, "You swept me off my feet", and consider how it'd sound if we used this very simple tool by adding the adjective "trembling" to it. We would have "You swept me off my trembling feet" which has just added more detail to what we are trying to say, and painted the picture more clearly. Marrying that with the imagery of the flood that we adopted, which already incorporated the adjective "violent" to describe the flood (remember that adjectives are describing words, and as a writer, that is what you seek: to describe something) we'd have "You swept me off my trembling feet like a violent flood" and boom, you have the idea of one who has fallen head over heels in love! He or she is literally drunk with it! The next time someone sees or hears of a flood, or of someone falling, they would most likely get back to that song just one more time!
5. Similes & metaphors
Those last two techniques bring us to these two. Our line "You swept me off my trembling feet like a violent flood" already applied the use of similes, helping you see how effective they could be. Remember we have two kinds of comparisons: direct and indirect. What we have in that line is indirect comparison, the direct version of which would be "You were a flood", or something to that effect. In that case, we'd have what we call a metaphor which simply refers to the direct comparison of one thing to another without using the words like or as. To clearly distinguish between the two, let's take a look at a simpler example. When we say Jack is as bold as a lion, or Jack is as bold as a lion, we are using similes; when we say Jack is a lion, we are talking metaphors.
The idea here is to relate what you are communicating to something else that your audience can identify with so that they can easily apprehend and assimilate your message.
Depending on how much latitude the melodies you use in your song give you, you can apply these where they fit and see how much more color they add to your art. We will look at a few more in the next blog. In the meantime, you can start putting these to work next time you grab your notepad to write.
Find Stanley's lyrics here: https://www.premiumlyrics.com/en-eu/lyrics/artist/stanley-chris
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