The purpose of the explorations project was to delve deep into something interesting and new. I, personally, was not very familiar with poetry before this project. I was, however, interested in music. I had played guitar for several years before the start of this project. This led to an interest in songwriting. For my project, I wanted to explore how poetry could complement music, and vice versa.
Throughout this project, I was reading poetry from some of the greats like Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath. I tried to familiarize myself with the poetic devices they used, and also their schools of poetry. Walt Whitman for example was a romantic poet. Romantic poets broke the barriers of classic poetry by pioneering free verse poems. Free verse poetry does not have any set rule on the structure of its poems. This makes for a more conversational piece. Sylvia Plath was a metaphysical poet. She used description of physical objects to represent larger feelings or ideas. After learning some of the tools poetry, I wrote a few poems of my own. I have a couple of them displayed below.
I then attempted to incorporate music into the poem. As my poems transitioned into songs, they started to developed rhyme schemes. Because my knowledge of musical theory is limited, I used simple chord progressions. I usually decided on chords before beginning to write. I would then write the song according to the tone of the chords I chose. Below is a picture of both the lyrics, and a recording of one of the songs I wrote.
My infographic was created to be a graphic represention of what I learned from this project. The objective was to keep it simple and focused. I created my illustrations in the Adobe application, Illustrator. I then placed these illustrations on a document in a different Adobe application called InDesign.
After writing poetry, I mixed a song in Pro Tools. I tried to use poetic devices when making the lyrics. A link to the song is shown below.
This was a fun project. I enjoyed writing poetry and music, but the biggest takeaway from the project was seeing what I still need to learn. In the future, I would like to take time and give myself a more in-depth education on the schools of poetry. I also want to see what tactics various songwriters use to incorporate poetry into their lyrics.