The Dissimilar Of The Similar Is A Sprinkler

All the definitions I’ve seen for the differences between songs and poetry I find unsatisfactory and so have sketched some of my own.

Songs are written for music, or at least with music in mind, or music happening somewhere nearby and making the words sweet and melodic, and ornamenting the ears with melisma and quatrains, as if the lyrics were shovels digging rhythms out of the substrate of the dead and making them walk again, and inspiring people to dance, which is a superfluity of movement designed to enhance the appearance of the body, and make it appear supple, and graceful, and capable of reproduction. Songs also have the capacity to make a lot of money, whereas poems languish in obscurity, like people fatigued from a pilgrimage, or shuffling about in wayward vocabularies, hungry for insights into the cosmos, sputtering like candles in utopian icebergs.

Songs move slowly like tractors ploughing a field of rich moist dirt, the emotional life sparked into life like a flock of birds, the frantic energy in a Neal Cassady letter, or Little Richard at the piano, the shine of joy and energy in his eyes.

Poetry is that bomb you find one day in an old factory basement that explodes into the confetti of beatitude. Poetry undermines the current narratives, the ones that put your mind in a cage. Poetry lets it all loose. The explosion of intellect is a pretty sight. The pyrotechnics of spirit rising into dilations of fire into the night sky kissing their sister stars.

Listening to a song requires no effort. Just bring your ears to it. The song does the rest.

A poem requires your full attention. It requires some effort on your part. A poem is a dumbbell. You’ve got lift it to get the benefit of it.

Songs are coordinated arrangements of sound. Harmonies and rhythms and articulations of melodic note angled and banked through barrels of pitch and timbre.

Poems are preternatural. They lumber out of the underworld rubbing their eyes and looking for sanctuary. A lamp and a desk and a room with a view. Sluices and perforations. Semantic foibles indemnified by the load they carry. Ramrod and slag confessing the heat of their making, the rapport of more and the infinite benefit of saying nothing at all, which is the apotheosis of the sublime.

The song is a distillate of intense feeling. Its economy is measured in ingots of sound. The poem is sand. Whatever washes ashore.

The poem grows toward the land in a swell of momentum, the curl of the divinely uncontrollable. It reveals a vast horizon at the edge of banality. And for that, it is despised.

Songs bring people together. Poems split atoms. One is a warm body in the dark. The other is a burst of light. And if you can tell the difference you must be blessed with the soul of a drunk.