🎤📚 Eminem, Dylan, and dead poets walk into a room - (Poetry Meetup)

📚🎤 Do song lyrics count as poetry if they still punch you in the throat?

(famous poems night + two modern lyric wildcards)
Discussion + read-aloud optional. Not an open mic. No poetry-slam vibes.

Here is the package I have put together with all the poems and some additional info about the poems. You can download it here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ULA4BUOjsGn2cedTaEKqypvLW_ravlW/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106877739920669003491&rtpof=true&sd=true

Short summary
The last poetry night landed better than I expected, which probably means two things:

1. people are more hungry for real language than they admit
2. most of us didn’t hate poetry - we hated school’s way of killing it
   So I want to do another one.

This time, I’m mixing famous poems we did not do last time with two modern lyric wildcards and letting the room argue a question people love pretending is already settled:
when does a song lyric become poetry?
Or more honestly:
If a line stays in your head for years and changes how you feel, do we really care what shelf it belongs on?
So yes, this night has dead poets.
It also has Bob Dylan and Eminem.
If that annoys you a little, good. That means we have a real room.

Likely picks:
- John Donne - Death Be Not Proud
- Dylan Thomas - Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
- Elizabeth Bishop - One Art
- Wilfred Owen - Dulce et Decorum Est
- Sylvia Plath - Mirror
- Seamus Heaney - Digging
Modern wildcards:
- Bob Dylan - It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
- Eminem - Lose Yourself

A few of these are old enough to have academic prestige.
A couple are modern enough to make purists twitch.
Perfect.

The room I want
- people who don’t need a “correct interpretation” before they trust their own reaction
- people who are willing to say “this line got me” without apologizing
- people who think language still matters
- people who secretly suspect a great song lyric may be doing the same work as a poem

The arguments worth having
- Which piece felt most alive tonight - not “best,” alive?
- Do poems comfort you, sharpen you, or quietly accuse you?
- When does language stop being “beautiful” and start becoming dangerous?
- Is memorability a serious standard, or just sentimentality dressed up?
- If Dylan and Eminem can sit in the same room as Donne and Plath for one night, what exactly is the room measuring?

How the night runs
We’ll start with one simple question:
What’s one line - from anything - that has actually stayed with you?
Then we go piece by piece:
read it, react to it, pull on one deeper thread, and move on before the room gets stale.
No one has to read aloud.
Listening counts.
Confusion counts too.

Dr. Adam Walker: “What is Poetry? | Close Reading Poetry for Beginners”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK1kLlNZ2Vk

When and where
📅 Date: Sunday, April 12, 1:00 PM
🕒 Time: 1 PM - 3 PM
📍 Location: Central Library - Meeting Rooms - come to 5th floor. Then look for room number 590 south. It's a conference looking room and is on your left when you leave the ELEVATOR.

Size
I’m capping it at 12–15 so it stays intimate and actually conversational.