Hello readers, I’m back again with another blog post! This week in ASTU we talked about poems, poems, poems and poems (we literally discussed about poems, not that I was trying to write a language poetry), okay moving on, we discussed about two types of poetry which were language poetry and lyric poetry. We also managed to finish reading the book written by Juliana Spahr titled This Connection of Everyone with Lungs which is filled by her collection of poems.

I was drawn into the idea of lyric poetry which usually expresses personal feelings, thoughts, emotions or mood, these emotions tend to lean towards love, death or loss. Other emotions can be expressed as well, but the emotion is always very intense.They also tend to be written in first person point of view. These characteristics reminds me of a song lyric which kept me thinking, what makes a song lyric and a lyric poetry different except for the tunes and music added in a song or is a song just a lyric poetry with tunes? Can you call a song writer a poet then? Can you even call Adele or Justin Bieber a poet?

Take, for example, a verse from Adele’s most recent song titled Hello which most of you guys already know:

“Hello, it’s me
I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet
To go over everything
They say that time’s supposed to heal ya
But I ain’t done much healing”

Clearly this verse fits the characteristics of a lyric poetry, it expresses personal feelings and emotions about love and loss “But I ain’t done much healing” and it uses a first person point of view “I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet”.

Another example is a verse from Justin Bieber’s new hit titled Sorry:

“Is it too late now to say sorry?
‘Cause I’m missing more than just your body, oh
Is it too late now to say sorry?
Yeah, I know-oh-oh, that I let you down
Is it too late to say I’m sorry now?”

“Cause I’m missing more than just your body” from this line, again, we can already see two characteristics of a lyric poetry which is personal feelings about love and a first person point of view.

So what do you guys think? What makes a lyric poetry and a song lyric different? or can you say that your favourite singer or song writer is a poet now? feel free to leave comments and thoughts down below!

Till next time,

Inneke Soeyanto

Works Cited:

-Adele. 25. XL Recordings, 2015. CD.

-Justin Bieber. Purpose. Def Jam, 2015. CD.