I don’t consider myself a poet. No, not really. Rather, I see myself as a writer of stories and songs.
But when it comes to songs, I do want to enable the lyric to stand on its own two feet, so to speak, without the support of rhythm and melody. Those that can (so stand, that is) I consider good lyrics.
Joni Mitchell almost always succeeds in this, a hallmark of her great artistry.
I used to call such wonders (in my view) song-poetry, though I feel the word is a little clumsy. It is, however, what I strove for: song-poetry. I am probably not the best to judge whether I succeeded or not in this aim.
Sometimes, however, a river comes rushing that cares little about melody, and cares little about story, it only cares about its own rushing, and those rushings—when I let them pour onto paper—I call poems.
Most of the time they rhyme or behave like poetry, but sometimes they behave more like brief (or not so brief) word dances and then I call them prose poems.
Here you can find some of them.
Ulf Wolf