For the next several blogs, I want to write about the people who have influenced me as a writer. I figured I should start with music because I wanted to be a songwriter before I wanted to be a poet.
I first thought I would write about Amy Grant and Wayne Kirkpatrick separately. Then I realized I really couldn’t. So much of what influenced me came from the songs they wrote together and from the way they use language.
One thing they taught me is that a poem should not just run in place.
When I write narrative poetry now, I often ask myself a version of the same question a songwriter might ask before getting to the chorus: Where has this stanza taken the reader that they were not standing four lines ago?
Poetry does not have much room for filler. There is not a lot of space to waste on weak phrasing or a pile of adjectives trying to make something feel important. Sometimes the right verb can do more work than three modifiers.
I hear that in Wayne Kirkpatrick’s writing. There is a certain muscle to the phrasing. The words are not there just because they rhyme or fit the rhythm. They hit the ear a certain way.
That is something I have tried to carry into my own poetry. I want the words to sound right, but I also want them to earn their place.
The same is true with movement. In narrative poetry, I want each stanza to do something. It can slow down. It can stay with an image. But it should still reveal something, shift something, or move the story somewhere new.
Grant and Kirkpatrick also taught me a lot about telling stories through images.
“Lead Me On,” written by Grant, Kirkpatrick, and Michael W. Smith, is a good example. The song moves through history using concrete details instead of just telling us how terrible something was.
“Whispers in the dark
Bitter cold terrain
Echoes of a slamming door”
Those lines do not explain the emotion. They create it.
That is something I keep having to remind myself about in my own poetry. A specific image can carry a lot more weight than an explanation of what I want the reader to feel.
“Takes a Little Time” taught me something different: repetition can build pressure.
“I know I’ve seen the look before
Sometimes in faces on the street
Sometimes in the mirror looking back at me”
That repeated “sometimes” keeps adding to the feeling before the song moves into the chorus. It is doing more than repeating a word. It is building the emotional movement of the song.
The song does not have to stop and explain everything. The image, the repetition, and the rhythm have already done much of the work.
That may be one of the biggest lessons I have carried from songwriting into poetry.
A poem needs movement. It needs cadence. It needs words that are there for a reason. And sometimes the strongest emotional moment comes when the writer trusts the image enough to stop talking.
I have probably been using some of these lessons for years without really thinking about where they came from. Now that I am taking poetry more seriously, I hear them differently.
When I revise, I find myself asking: Did the poem move? Did the image do enough? Did I choose the strongest word? Did I trust the reader enough not to explain everything?
There is still a lot I can learn from the songs that first taught me how words can carry a story.
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