Status Updates From The Poetics of American Son...

While songwriters often claim that their work is poetry, poets themselves seldom insist that their poems are songs unless they are intentionally signaling that a poem is striving to offer a visionary quality, a sensation beyond the words themselves xiv

When we argue that song lyrics are poetry, often what we mean is that song lyrics deserve the same respect, the same attention, the same care we might put into reading a poem. This may be why the comparison between poems and songs only moves in that one direction.- xiv