I have had poems that I kind of set to tunes in my head but have never really set out to deliberately write a lyric. That said, I love a good lyric and some of my favourite lyricists are also published poets (Leonard Cohen, for instance) so I think the idea of approaching it as poetry is a sound one. If I was going to try writing lyrics, I would probably listen to and read the lyrics of some of my favourites in the style of music I was targeting to get into the mindset, then see what came out of me rather than thinking about it too much. The thinking would come afterward when I started editing and trying to make it fit a tune. But more likely, I would just write poetry that had a nice, regular pattern so could be fitted to a tune easily. Among my current poems, Spooky People is the one that I can most easily see becoming a song.
