Last year, Laura Salas and I worked our way through the book WRITING THE LIFE POETIC by Sage Cohen. We took turns hosting the conversation on our blog and we shared some insights from a chapter we chose to read that week. Then we ended it with doing one of the exercises from the book.  One of them was about using song lyrics as models for poems. This works great because we all know those songs that get caught in our head for one reason or another, the same way we want a poem to be imprinted in our minds. In the classroom this can be a lot of fun to have the students bring in copies of the lyrics of their favorite songs and then watch a video of the song on YouTube before settling in to right.

For the exercise I chose a  favorite song of mine called SECRETS by One Republic. When I first heard the song on Pandora, I burst into tears. When I watched the video, it didn’t mesh for me because in my brain I was hearing a different story, the story of a writer trying to find their way in the world.

Here are the lyrics by Ryan Tedder.

I need another story
Something to get off my chest
My life gets kinda boring
Need something that I can confess
‘Til all my sleeves are stained red

From all the truth that I’ve said
Come by it honestly I swear
Thought you saw me wink, no
I’ve been on the brink, so

Tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

My God, amazing how we got this far
It’s like we’re chasing all those stars
Who’s driving shiny big black cars

And everyday I see the news
All the problems that we could solve
And when a situation rises
Just write it into an album
Singing straight, too cold
I don’t really like my flow, no, so

Tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

Oh, got no reason, got no shame
Got no family I can blame
Just don’t let me disappear
I’ma tell you everything

So tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away

So tell me what you want to hear
Something that were like those years
Sick of all the insincere
So I’m gonna give all my secrets away

This time, don’t need another perfect line
Don’t care if critics never jump in line
I’m gonna give all my secrets away
All my secrets away, all my secrets away

After listening to the song two or three or, okay, maybe a dozen times, here is the poem I came up with.

I NEED

I need to know
that getting up in the morning
matters to the world
to someone other than the man
who matters so much to me,
the man who may not understand
why I need to know
that I matter at all.

You can tell me
it shouldn’t matter
but it does.
You can tell me
I matter in ways
I may not understand
in so many ways I can
only hope to believe

But I need to know
the kind of knowing that comes
from some place deep inside
some place I don’t reside
I want to run and hide because
what I fear is the world
discovering
uncovering
pieces of soul
I don’t want the world to see
what I fear
is that what I need
matters too much to me

–Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved.

Your turn. If there’s a song you feel drawn to, search for the lyrics online and then try to model a poem based on that song. Good luck!