It’s National Poetry Month, and I am excited. I love wordplay and turns of phrase, so I’m happy that this is the 29th year to celebrate wordsmithing of the poetic variety — the Academy of American Poets started this tradition in 1996.
According to the Academy of American Poets website, the month “is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture and that poetry matters.” I fully agree. I write poetry to capture moments, hold on to memories and process my emotions.
One of my notebooks still holds poems I wrote when I was in elementary school. I’m not about to submit those to the National Poetry Competition, but it’s nonetheless fun to see what captured my imagination when I was 9 or 10.
For National Poetry Month, I’ve curated a playlist of seven songs that represent poetic devices like allusion, irony and rhyme. I call it “the wordplaylist.” Prepare to be taken back to middle school English class.
Acrostic - “Count On Me” by Mat Kearney
An acrostic is what you get when you begin a series of lines with a letter of the alphabet — either going in alphabetical order or spelling out a word like Edgar Allan Poe did in his poem “An Acrostic.”
Kearney’s song is a partial acrostic, with each line of the first verse including a number, going from “one day to get it all right” to “ate my heart out daily, baby.” What I really enjoy about this song is that in the second verse, he switches to using successive letters: “amen, we’ve made it this far/b-boys in VW cars” and so forth.
Allusion - “Song for Another Time” by Old Dominion
This song brims with allusions, which are references to other people, events and literary works. By my count (with the help of Genius Lyrics), this song references 23 other songs in its lyrics, from “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison and “Paradise City” by Guns N Roses to “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry.
Enjambment - “London Boy” by Taylor Swift
Whatever you think of the rhyme scheme in the lines “you can find me in a pub we/are watching rugby/with his school friends,” it’s a great example of enjambment. This French-derived word describes what happens when a poet doesn’t end a thought by the end of a line. By putting the subject and the verb in separate lines, Swift is “enjambing” in this song. Yes, I’m making that word up, because it sounds like “jamming” and that is musically apropos.
Idiom - “Don’t Mess With Exes” by Mackenzie Carpenter
An idiom is a saying with an often-idiosyncratic meaning; think of expressions like “up a creek without a paddle” or “close, but no cigar.”
The song plays off the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” and I have a lot of fun listening to all the Lone Star State-and-dating-related expressions in Carpenter’s song, like “it’s sending a message/bigger than Texas, you know what it says/when you send it that late and your heart’s in a lone star state”.
Irony - “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette
The beauty of this song is the situations described aren’t ironic. Rain on your wedding day or a “no smoking” sign on your cigarette break are unfortunate, but they don't quite fit Merriam-Webster's definition: “the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning.” Oh, the irony.
Pun - “Glad You Came” by The Wanted
If you ask anyone who has known me for longer than half an hour, they’ll tell you that I love puns. Cheesy or clever, I’m delighted when people play with the fact that many words have multiple meanings or sound like a word with a different meaning.
The pre-chorus of this song has long been one of my favorites, because each line starts with the word that ended the one before it, often taking a noun and then using it as a verb. For example, “Now I’ll take you by the hand/hand you another drink/drink it if you can/can you spend a little time?”
English has so many verbs that come from nouns and vice versa, that this type of wordplay is likely to slip under our radars, but I really enjoy it when artists employ it.
Rhyme - “Wild Things” by Alessia Cara
Rhyme might be the most basic poetic device on this list, but I wasn’t going to write a column about wordplay in songs and not include “Wild Things.”
Cara does a masterful job of making rhymes with some unexpected pairings, particularly in the first verse. I love the lines “find table spaces, say your social graces, bow your head/they’re pious here, but you and I, we’re pioneers/we make our own rules, our own room, no bias here.”
The type of rhyme found in the duo of “pious here” and “pioneers” is called a slant rhyme — they have almost the same sounds, but not quite. I’m a big fan of slant rhymes.
I hope this playlist prompts you to think about some of your favorite songs and the poetic devices that contribute to why you like them. Who knows, maybe it will help you in an English class someday.
