Hear the Music, Read the Poetry: Form Is Everything

Hi! It’s Laura - if you’re rolling your eyes at the word ‘poetry,’ then…

…your Spotify playlist must only be podcasts, and you’ve never strolled the hallowed halls of the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum or explored the galleries at the National Museum of African American Music. Music IS poetry!

Poetry is powerful, and if you’ve been keeping up with things - Chappel Roan’s song Subway (which is about a breakup, by the way) caused the first spike in two years for the Canadian province of Saskatchewan…about 50K interactions! Talk about communication with power!

At any rate, there’s so much to love about poetry and its ability to inspire creativity (and moves to different countries). MUSAY is here for all of it.

Enjoy this continuation of Darius Coleman’s powerful poetic communication insights from last week and perhaps you’ll be inspired too. If you are, send us a note - we’d love to hear from you!

A Community of Poets - Artists - Humans

In last week’s post, we talked about how museums have aided poets (and other artists) by allowing them to workshop their art, but we haven’t talked about the fact that museums (and by extension, MUSAY) showcasing this art then inspires people to create art themselves. 

MUSAY is about fostering a community that cares about museums and appreciates history, art, science, and all things human. And that within itself is partially why I think form is so important for up-and-coming artists. Some people connect to one form over another.  

To help you understand more about what I mean, this week’s piece continues the conversation about museums, poetry and culture. I hope you enjoy and get inspired — as a matter of fact, go to a museum and let the inspiration continue.

One of the most important lessons you learn on this earth is that how you say something often matters as much as what you say. This is in poetry, music, movie scripts and your day-to-day communications. 

A great example of this phenomenon? Breakups.

I remember back in my younger days, I was dating a girl in high school. High school relationships are so young and dumb. You think you will make it all the way to the end of the earth, even if you don’t know your significant other’s middle name or have never seen them outside of school. I kept hearing people say I was going to get broken up with, and that didn’t make sense to me. We cared about each other. Why would it be over this soon? 

And then, she told me. 

Breaking up with someone is really hard to do. You don’t want to invalidate their feelings or make them feel lesser than, but you also have to be honest with yourself and what you feel. It’s your last love letter to your partner in that way. You should handle it with care. 

So, what did she tell me that day at 6:42 a.m. outside of Middle College High School? 

“I just want someone I can show off more and…you’re kinda just…you.” 

I felt like I got shot in the chest with a rifle. 

I didn’t tell you this story just because I wanted to get my trauma out. I did so because for the second part of the Creator's Guide to Poetry, it's important to remember that…

As described in MUSAY’s last newsletter, poets can workshop their craft at museums around the world. But how did they perfect their written and published poetry? One of the things that having small group readings allows poets to do is to formulate and change the forms and types of poetry they write. 

Form Follows Poetic Inspiration

So today, I’d like to give you different ways you can write poetry when it comes to pure physical form and what type of poetry is used within those forms.

1. Prose Poetry 

What I wrote above was technically prose writing. You have to remember that prose is more normal than anything. In fact, the definition of prose is “the ordinary language people use in speaking or writing.”

This might make you ask, “Wait a minute, how can something be a poem and prose at the same time?” 

It’s important to remember that writing poetically has nothing to do with the words’ format. It has to do with what the words say. There are authors that write in a poetic way, which is to say that they do not waste words. Prose writing is how you’d write normally: paragraphs and complete sentences with normal English writing rules. 

So…how can this be useful? 

One thing that I found early in my poetry career was that it was easier to write in prose until I got good at framing other types of poetry. I was used to writing in prose. The only thing that changed was adding extra care to each word.

A poet that I think does a wonderful job of this is Charles Bukowski. He’s a surreal and ironic poet, who also (as all poets do) writes in other forms besides just prose. If you want to get good at prose, you study the best. To me, that’s him. 

2. Haiku

I remember in elementary school, we had a four-week set learning path about Japanese history. In this case, the introduction of haikus was maybe the first time I had learned about poetry. And then I never heard of them again. So, allow me to remind you guys. 

A haiku is a short-form poetry category created in Japan that follows a 5-7-5 structure. This means there are five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. As a poet, you have to focus on choosing the best word and best use of syllables. Because if you go over, it is no longer a haiku. 

Haikus often involve nature and finding a way to connect the spirit of nature to humans and the world. One of my favorite ways this was used was in the video game Ghost of Tsushima. Every time your in-game character met a certain hot spring or tree, you would get the option to create a haiku that you could read later based on how you felt as the main character in the story. 

Go play that game. And go write haikus. 

3. Verse Poetry 

When you think of poetry, this is probably what you think of. 

Verse poetry is written in lines and usually collected in stanzas. There are also many different ways within verse poetry to write and express your emotion. 

Most early poets wrote in rhymes. That style would be described as “rhythm poetry,” which was the most popular form until we got into more modern eras. As poets advanced, they began to reach a place where they experimented with rhyme and even stopped rhyming. This is how we got blank verse, where there is a clear metric rhythm from word to word without the constraints of having to rhyme. 

Finally, we have the type that is most popular today, which is free verse poetry. This form has no rules in terms of rhythm or rhyme, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks any structure. I, personally, love using this form for poems where there is a focus on things outside of the format. A very long story, important information dropped from verse to verse, or something musical within the poem — it all goes straight to Verse Poetry. It’s also the default at this point, and that matters. 

Now that I’m better at poetry, I love free verse. But if you are a person who likes spoken word poetry, then you’d most likely be into rhythm verse and blank verse.

A great exercise is to write the same poem with all three types of verse poetry and determine if you like it. 

4. Golden Shovel 

This is my favorite of the bunch, but it’s going to take a little explaining. 

A golden shovel is a poem written partially with the words of a quote or previous poem. This format was popularized by Terrance Hayes, who will also serve as our example to explain this poetry. 

This form is an amazing way to express respect for and honor a past poet or idea while also building on the previous thought or creating a new one. Generally, every word of the “original” poem would be the last word in a line of the new poem. Some (like me) actually make it the first word of every line instead of the last. But whether it is forward or backward, it is still a golden shovel. 

For example, here is a popular poem from one of my favorite poets of all time, Gwendolyn Brooks: “We Real Cool.”

We real cool.

We Left school. 

We Lurk late. 

We Strike straight. 

We Sing sin. 

We Thin gin.

We Jazz June. 

We Die soon.

And this is a golden shovel poem from Terrance Hayes:

I. 1981 

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we

cruise at twilight until we find the place the real

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.

His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we

drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left

in them but approachlessness. This is a school

I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we

are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk

of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.

Standing in the middle of the street last night we

watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike

his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight

Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we

used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing

his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.

The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We

watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.

He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.

He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We

stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,

how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June

the boy would be locked upstate. That night we

got down on our knees in my room. If I should die

before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.

The last word of each line also follows the original emotion and story of Brooks’ original. It’s an amazing form that is becoming more popular because of poets like Hayes. 

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that poetry is integral to the ecosystem of art — and that is why it is found at museums among the works of painters, sculptors, and thinkers. It’s found in science and the beauty of nature.  As I said, the fact that museums (and by extension, MUSAY) showcase this art inspires people to create art themselves. 

MUSAY celebrates a community of people that care about many different things: history, art, science, and all things human. Being able to find and join a community that fits you — and that you connect with — is critical to your health, happiness and ability to flourish. People want to be heard.  

Speaking of being heard, my final poetry post will be about how to find inspiration and how to keep writing even when you don’t feel like it. 

But that’ll be for next time.

About Darius Coleman

Darius doesn’t just see the world. He feels it — deeply. He takes it in so it can surprise him, challenge him, and ultimately inspire him to dream, to write, to create. Whether it’s prose or poetry, sports or culture, Darius’s voice is one you must hear. A 2025 Magna Cum Laude graduate of Tennessee State University’s School of Mass Communications, Darius is only getting started and MUSAY is overjoyed he’s starting here.

musay_today

120 followers

View more on Instagram

About MUSAY

MUSAY is an app that transforms phones from isolation devices into discovery tools to  connect people with cultural experiences they never knew they needed — creating community around shared moments of awe while helping cultural institutions thrive.

MUSAY believes people, especially Gen Z, deserve more than endless scrolling through other people's lives and has engaged them in its design process.  The result is an App that gets people off their sofa and off their screen by helping them find things to do that fit their vibe; with all the things to do being at museums.  

© 2025 MUSAY Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.