Lyrics as Poetry

Book of RhymesToday is the first day of National Poetry Month. I’ve been thinking about how to celebrate, as well as where I encounter poetry in my every day life. I remembered a recent book review I read about Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop that starts

Are you a hip-hop fan who can’t tell assonance from alliteration? An English major who doesn’t know Biggie from Tupac? Adam Bradley’s “Book of Rhymes” is the crash course for you. The book — essentially English 101 meets Hip-Hop Studies 101 — is an analysis of what Bradley calls “the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world”: rap, which he rightly says “is poetry, but its popularity relies in part on people not recognizing it as such.”

Song lyrics as poetry isn’t a new idea — probably originated before Shakespeare. That review reminded me how I first got interested in poetry — in high school I wrote a paper on lyrics as poetry. I don’t remember the songs, or how, in the pre-web era, I found the words. But I do remember that my Mom was curious about the songs I was considering, and we talked at some length about many of them. One in particular piqued her interest, Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles:

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?