musical links?

Personally, I was an avid poetry hater for much of my life. Every time I read poetry, it felt like my brain was exploding. I went out of my way to avoid poetry. But besides in children’s books and English classes, poetry has managed to seep into our lives, despite most of the population’s active resistance. Many of commercial music’s most popular artists write poetry: Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Kurt Cobain, 2Pac, Eminem, and Alicia Keys. Writing poetry has elevated their level of lyricism; their words simply just sound better, easier and more pleasing to hear. And in a way, isn’t music a type of poetry? It’s a form of poetry akin to riding a bike with the training wheels on; the meter, rhythm, and cadence are given. For the past week, instead of actively avoiding poetry, I tried to search for poetry and found so much of it already present in my everyday life. There’s even a form of poetry, spoken word, which is basically a song without the music. And what about nursery rhymes? Or even the Star-Spangled Banner? These songs were simply poems before someone decided to set them to music. Musicians love to play with words too, working with homophones, slant rhymes, and other rhyme schemes. There are countless videos on YouTube documenting the rhyme schemes of famous rappers like MF Doom, Andre 3000, and Eminem. I think a way for me, and others, to grow to love poetry is if we stop viewing it as something foreign and look at it the same way I look at music. I spend hours reading lyrics and watching interviews of artists talking about their songs and work. I pour over the lyrics, watching videos on theme analysis and musical interpretation. Poetry isn’t as foreign as people like to think it is, in fact, it shares many characteristics with music, something that I personally can’t live without. And if we can grow to see poetry in the same light as music, maybe that 18th-century poem won’t end up looking so daunting.