by Kirby Congdon…….

Many creative people are able to combine their own lyrics with their own music. To be able to bring two different mediums together is impressive. It is rather like having a dancer perform on stage with castanets, a piano or a full orchestra. How can one’s mind fit the rhythm of language into the complex construction of a music score without crashing and bringing the curtain down before the clue? There is melody and sound, the restrictions of a key, a mood, along with the acrobatics of an eighty-eight keyboard that needs to be spontaneous and original without distorting the flow of a poem’s verbal descriptions, grammar and an economical vocabulary all of which often take us outside of normal reasoning? It simply cannot be done, but of course it is done whether it is crooning in a cabaret or singing a world-shaking aria that transforms all the meaning in the performance of an opera.

It is interesting that poets do not anticipate any use of their work in any other context yet history provides legendary accounts, the lore of human expression, in the innumerable instances of every kind of song from the cradle to the grave, from the casual nursery hub-bub to the professional chorus.

How is this facilitated? Perhaps part of the answer lies in the fact that every word of a poem gets individual attention by its maker. The source in a lyric may be extended or passed over quickly and so serves an outside purpose but it does not achieve the aesthetic heights that a finished poem may offer. A poem may even provoke a musical setting independent of an instrument while lyrics do not often survive their original use for a particular need — to advance a plot, to define a romance or project a secondary idea in politics, religious rites or in some social activity. A lyric depends for its success on its associations while a good poem often survives all kinds of attention on several levels of feeling and thought and yet is remembered, when all is said and done, for its own sake. We may be asked, in our education, to memorize a poem, but has any student in school been asked to memorize a lyric? A clever lyric probably serves a purpose outside of itself. A poem exists for its own sake in the experience of writing it well.

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