Sometimes poetry gets a bad rap.
I’ve mentioned poetry to a group of friends before and seen grimaces by some, who shuttered and thought of high school classes on Shakespeare, Byron, and Shelley. No surprise. The language and usage were different then, so poems needed a bit of translation. Other friends glanced away and remembered their own high school angst when they wrote poems about unrequited loves. Some of you may identify with those two reactions.
But when we think of songs as poetry, there’s a different response. Hearing a song takes us back to a specific moment. And I’m guessing that moment was after words spoke to your own experiences.
When I heard Kris Kristofferson had died, I immediately thought not of his gravelly singing voice or his acting career, but his poetry. He was first and foremost a writer. He earned two degrees in English, one from Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He also led a fascinating life with roller-coaster ups and downs.
As a captain in the army, he flew helicopters. Later, he flew copters for oil rigs in the Gulf, then headed weekends to Nashville to peddle his songs. (Warning: If I know your life story, I may use it for a character’s background. I ‘borrowed’ from Kristofferson’s colorful life in 2022 for The Sure-Fire Never-Fail No-Risk Plan that takes place on a Mississippi riverboat. My hero also formed a band while stationed in Germany and flew helicopters to oil derricks.)
Without immediate success in Nashville, Kristofferson swept floors and emptied ashtrays at a record company to be around singers and songwriters. He was a quick study. Instead of using the King’s English, he learned to pepper his songs with idioms and phrasings the way folks talked, following Mark Twain’s advice to not use a dollar word when a fifty-cent word would do. He found universal emotions by turning a phrase upside down or on its side.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” “Me and Bobby McGee.”
“There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning.” “For the Good Times.”
“Yesterday is dead and gone, and tomorrow’s out of sight.” “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
I’ve been listening to Kristofferson songs, many sung by some of the hundreds of artists who covered them. His poetry takes many shapes as different singers mold them. They put their own spin on the songs, and we put ours on them as they relate to our lives.
We get out of poetry, and not just poetry in songs, the emotions and experiences we bring to them. Just my opinion based on simple experiences like this one:
Monday night, I sat on the screened-in back porch, reading a book for pleasure. Occasionally I glanced out at the freshly mowed grass, clipped hedge, and the still woods. No wind stirred a leaf. I felt at peace, what Edna St. Vincent Millay must have felt when she wrote:
“Thous’t made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,–let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
The language is archaic, but the meaning is clear to me. She was full of gratitude and wanted not one thing more to disturb the perfection of the scene in front of her. That’s my own understanding because of my own experience. Someone else’s interpretation may be different.
Kristofferson’s experiences led him to choose for his tombstone the words from a Leonard Cohen song:
“Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.”
Rest in Peace, American poet Kris Kristofferson.
