Pop

Few were surprised when Lana Del Rey announced her 2020 debut poetry collection, first released as a spoken word album accompanied by sounds of the ocean and then as a hard cover book. The singer-songwriter had often spoken about the influence of Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath on her work, with short film Tropico quoting the former and Norman F***ing Rockwell namechecking the latter.

Del Rey was so enthused about this sideline she vowed to bind each copy of Violet Bend Backwards Over the Grass herself and sell it for a mere dollar. Publishers Simon & Schuster inevitably had other ideas for the 19 poems and 10 haikus which, like her musical output, were steeped in the mythology of the American Dream. Reviews were mixed, but killer lines like “I can’t seem to blow off enough steam to get you out of my head/SoulCycle you to death” on “Salamander” justified the price tag.

Drake initially seemed committed to his unlikely detour into the poetry realm. “I don’t know if I have ever wanted people to buy or support something more in my life,” he admitted while announcing 2023’s Titles Ruin Everything, written with regular musical collaborator Kenza Samir. At 168 pages, the accompaniment to eighth LP For All the Dogs sounded like quite the tome, too. But most poems, if you can even call them poems, simply consist of a single couplet presented across two pages.

Their content isn’t much more substantial, with Drake often resorting to his hyper-macho default (“There are two types of women in this world/Women who like giving head and women who I don’t like”). There’s a handful of clever dad jokes in there, but Titles Ruin Everything reads more like a series of Instagram captions than a serious attempt to establish poetic credentials.

“He would stare at the space between my eyebrows/too cowardly to make eye contact/and say/’I’m going to f–king kill you.’/And I would believe him.” As evident from the domestic violence tale “Lighthouse,” Halsey’s 2020 poetry collection I Would Leave Me If I Could often made for harrowing reading, with the “Closer” singer addressing her experiences of sexual assault, miscarriage and bipolar disorder. Of course, before signing their first record deal, Halsey made a name with similarly confessional and hard-hitting poems on Tumblr. This admirably unfiltered collection further proved that Grammy-nominated chart topper hadn’t diluted their powerful way with words.

Tupac Shakur’s only collection, The Rose That Grew from Concrete, hit the shelves three years after his 1996 murder. Like most posthumous 2Pac releases, it was a hit, with fans — desperate for any further examples of his creative genius — flocking to bookstores in droves. The following year’s audio adaptation, read by voices as diverse as Q-Tip, Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Nikki Giovanni, even reached the Billboard 200. Written between 1989 and 1991, this collection finds Shakur exploring themes synonymous with his musical output – poverty, racial discrimination, gang violence and, on the tragically prophetic “And 2morrow,” the needless loss of young lives.

You could argue that every pop star who’s been allowed to show off their poetic side owes it all to Jewel. It was the “Foolish Games” singer who alerted publishers to the fact that the two art forms needn’t be mutually exclusive when her 1998 collection, A Night Without Armor, sold an astonishing two million copies: it’s reportedly still America’s best-selling poetry book of all time. Inspired by the likes of Dylan Thomas and Charles Bukowski, as well as the journals she’d kept since childhood, Jewel touches upon her family, first loves and Alaskan hometown in a manner that’s sometimes evocative, sometimes overly sincere. That’s something slam poet Beau Sia took full advantage of, quickly issuing a parody titled A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge.

“It is about wading into the saltwater of your own body, capillaries bursting, eyes brimming, unmoored. This collection is the fruit of that inner probing.” Even the press statement announcing Arlo Parks’ The Magic Border sounded impressively poetic. That’s little surprise considering both her Mercury Prize-winning debut Collapsed in Sunbeams and follow-up My Soft Machine opened with intimate, spoken-word pieces. The latter is particularly intertwined with insights into the Grammy nominee’s mind. Not only are its lyrics printed, but as on “Lanterns (Outside Parabé),” Parks chews over its inception (“Walking by myself is the only thing that calms me down/The record is nowhere near finished and it’s hurting me”).

After plans to tour her eponymous third LP in 2020 were derailed by the pandemic, Kelsea Ballerini decided that instead of using the downtime to watch Tiger King or bake banana bread, she’d unleash her inner poet. The result was Feel Your Way Through, a candid collection of poems which addressed her struggles with body image, growing up with divorced parents and the fact she watched a classmate die during a high school shooting. Nashville fans, however, will perhaps be most interested in “The Right Side of History” where Ballerini tackles the backlash she received for her “not all country music” response to Morgan Wallen’s racist slur (which he later apologized for).

Following a 23-minute autobiographical short and second consecutive top 5 LP on the Billboard 200, Jhené Aiko concluded her 2017 MAP (movie, album, poetry) trilogy with the curiously titled 2Fish. Named in honor of her Pisces star sign, the collection was assembled from various notebooks she’d kept since the age of 12, which no doubt explains its teen-friendly themes of isolation and inferiority and odes to her musical idols: “I feel like my family has been thuggin our whole lives/i feel like no one understands what it feels like to have a gun in their face at 5,” she writes about another moonlighting poet, Tupac Shakur. “I don’t try to use words you don’t understand,” Aiko told Billboard, a simple but effective approach which allowed her to channel her childhood alter-ego Penny.

Accompanied by the lyrics from her first two blockbuster albums Songs in A Minor and The Diary of Alicia Keys, Tears for Water saw the early ‘00s savior of classic soul add “poet” to her list of talents. But if you were hoping to discover a little more about the famously guarded Alicia Keys as a person, you were out of luck. There are no fewer than 27 original poems featured here, but as with her lyrical output, its expressions of love, longing and loneliness keep things relatively open-ended (“Sometimes I feel/ like I don’t belong anywhere/And it’s going to take so long/for me to get somewhere”). Entertainment Weekly critics certainly left frustrated, writing, “Her work would not pass muster in an introductory writing course at a four-year college.” Ouch.

“What would I say/If it was just me/Not full of choirs, singing f–king constantly,” asks Florence Welch on “Song,” one of many original poems featured on 2018 collection Useless Magic. Embrace the everyday, become more confessional and indulge in some casual name-dropping (including Bryan Ferry, Lady Gaga and Liza Minnelli) appears to be the answer. Comprised of words “not beautiful enough, too bloody and ragged” to grace her majestic discography, alt-pop’s high priestess constantly wrestles with the difference between her poetic and songwriting talents: the lyrics to the first four Florence + The Machine albums are here, too. But these self-referential, self-described “muddy trinkets” prove she’s equally adept at both.