On Lyrics, a Basic Primer

[tun]

You know, poetry is required to present a unity of rhythm and meaning self-sufficiently. Okay, so that's a poem, right? So there we go. It's that simple. And that's not to say that poetry needs to be metered verse or free verse or anything. It just needs to have its own coherent essential essence. And that's just something that you can arrive at intuitively. You don't need to have any technical knowledge of anything, but a poem needs to be a song in itself, one way or the other, as it were. That's poetry. It's that simple. Now, with lyrics, they don't need that stand alone integrity, because they've got music. They can be something else in some other way. They don't need to stand on their own. And it may be the case that if they do stand on their own, they're crowding, they're competing with the music, or it may not. But that's the essential difference.