Songs and Poems

I wrote this as a comment on a post on Don Share's blog:

I first started writing poems regularly around 1983 or so, in a free-verse mode under the influence of Denise Levertov (CW teacher at Stanford). And I started writing songs regularly around 1985. For a long time, the two modes were quite separate for me: songs were in rhyme and meter, and poems weren't. In the mid-nineties, though, the boundary began to blur a bit, as I began to write more and more poems in meter (rhymed and unrhymed). For me, now, the only identifiable difference between verse written to be a song and verse that is not going to become a song is simple: if the verses contain a lot of enjambment, it's hard to make them a singable song, because it's hard to write melodies that won't ignore the lineation. But if the verses don't have a lot of enjambment, then they can easily be made into a song, if I find a good melody and chords.

John Daniel

Keith Woodruff drew my attention to John Daniel's website. John was my first poetry teacher. Here's what I wrote as a comment on Keith's blog:

Thanks for the link to John's web site. It inspired me to drop him a note. I have fond memories of my two workshops with him: reading Bishop and Roethke (among others), looking at Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" as an example of a good song lyric, having my apprentice poems ripped to pieces — in anticipation of their further shredding in Denise Levertov's workshops, until one day she said that a poem of mine needed no workshopping, because it was done. That poem, "The Burning," is the only poem from that period that I still submit anywhere or consider part of a possible manuscript.