What is this?

It sounds intriguing, but you're not sure what to make of that cryptic lead-in phrase: song-poem. It's not found in any dictionary. While it might seem to simply imply "poetry set to a tune," what "song-poem" actually refers to is something more specific than that -- something, in fact, that has much more to do with commerce than it does with songs, poetry or music.

The song-poem story involves a succession of publishing and recording companies that have occupied the lowest rungs of the music industry ladder for over 100 years. By appropriating the rhetoric of the legitimate (so-called) music industry, the owners of such companies prey on the dual yearnings among the general public for access to the inner sanctum of show business and a means to get rich quick, as well as the fact that nearly everyone has written some sort of poem at one point in their life or another.

Song-poem entrepreneurs (called "song sharks") manipulate these facets of human nature to deceive naive individuals into subsidizing a quest to have their poem become the lyric of a smash hit record. In the parlance of this parallel-universe enterprise, "song-poem" is code for the originating verse. The reason that a code is resorted to bespeaks of the patronizing nature of the song-poem game: its proprietors believe that their typical customer is too dumb to grasp the meaning of the simple English word "lyric." At the same time it's meant to signal an expanse of possible source materials, as in, "We'll set your song, your poem, even your goddamn shopping list to music; we don't care what you give us, so long as your checks don't bounce."