Poetry

The January 2010 issue of Esquire runs the magazine's ninth "Meaning of Life" feature, this time as a series of interviews with various celebrities who have won awards in the first decade of this millennium. Interestingly, they don't list the interviewers' questions, just (what I imagine are some of) the key celebrity quotes from each conversation.

One page is devoted to Sting, and I bet it could have been more because he seems to have plenty of wit and wisdom to share about life as a pop star, husband, and father. But somehow what stuck with me out of everything he said was this:

"People send me song lyrics all the time. It's difficult. I'm not sure what they want me to do with them. Looking at lyrics without the music is like looking at a one-legged man."

When I read that, I just thought it was a sort of funny, if rather melodramatic, analogy. And then, days later, I remembered it and thought, lyrics without music--that's just a poem. Hasn't anyone who's taken a music theory class been assigned the project of writing the music to a favorite poem? But the more I thought about it the more I came to realize that there is a very distinct difference. When I write something--not something like this, but something fragmentary, which usually occurs to me already formed--I know whether I want it to be a poem or a song. There is something there in poetry that lyrics just don't have. A poem is somehow complete on its own. It has a thread to it already, and doesn't require music to keep it together or to propel you through it. I'm not sure what it is, since both lyrics and poetry that I write tend to share rhymey and rhythmic qualities, but there is definitely something else cohesive that lyrics lack and poems have. I guess Sting's fans are hoping he can fill in the music their words need to become something complete.