One Weird Trick For Telling If the Second Stanza Got Moved Up
It almost seems impossible, doesn’t it? To know if a song’s second stanza got moved to first place? (Even if there’s linear storytelling in the song, it’s still hard to tell, because the second stanza could swap with the first as a foreshadowing teaser.) But there is one weird trick for knowing with certainty. And I’m now prepared to reveal all (for one can keep important secrets like this only so long before the yearning to share simply becomes unsupportable). The first stanza of a song surely tends to contain the first lines written by the songwriter — the germ, the heart of the song — and that first stanza tends to be the best written, strongest section. The second stanza tends to be filler, compelled by the laws of structure to mirror the first stanza while being slightly different. The second stanza is extraneous at worst, artificial surely, and oh-so-rarely brilliant. The issue is that the listener, not necessarily quite hooked into the song yet, tends to gloss over the first stanza. Horror — for one’s best stanza to go unappreciated! (And damn those catchy choruses for being the only thing most anyone recalls at a moment’s notice! Those gaudy choruses with their feather boas and their flashy sequins. All glitz and glamor, but where’s the substance?) The only hope is to swap stanzas 1 and 2. (If there’s a third stanza, the laws of ultimogeniture dictate that it stay behind and take care of the parents.) Let the weaker second stanza get glossed over, and as listeners find themselves hooked, hit them with the strong first stanza and really blow them away. Unnecessary proof of practice: Ratt’s song “Round and Round.”
A Lyric-Writing Tip That’s a Googlewhack
We checked, and we’re pleased that our one and only bit of advice to lyricists and other poets is a Googlewhack. “Change all similes to metaphors.” In other words, instead of a simile such as “You’re like the sun,” go for the metaphor “You are the sun.” A simile, with that pesky word “like,” draws attention to its formal status as a comparison. The only other person to have suggested changing all similes to metaphors is the poet Eric Pankey, in The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project (2004), so this is rare advice indeed.
Answering a Call by the Poet Laureate of Calgary and Banff
Gotta love an unusual challenge from out of the blue, right? This is our sheet music and recording of “Clockwork Punctuation: [Andy Warhol’s] a, A Novel as Beat Poetry,” in answer to a call by Derek Beaulieu (Poet Laureate of Calgary and Banff) to set to music his erasure of Warhol’s 1968 novel, in which Beaulieu leaves only the punctuation. We fed the punctuation from page 2 into our one-of-a-kind, persnickety clockwork contraption, assigning the exclamation points to the voice of the cuckoo clock bird and other symbols to different chimes and mechanisms. (Before the invention of MIDI, programmed music required meticulously timed Grandfather clocks, and every performance ticked at 60 bpm. In the tradition of the original “old school,” this clockwork recording features vintage timepieces.) Here’s a link to the mp3. The mp3 is mirrored on Soundcloud.
Thanks to the acclaimed Canadian poet Christian Bök (author of the astonishing Eunoia) for calling our recording “a beautiful clockwork sonata.”
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