Turning Poems Into Songs With DOBBY & Leah Senior
Bringing verse to life
As part of Poetry Month 2025, Red Room Poetry invited audiences into the beating heart of lyricism with Middle of the Air: Writing Lyrics with DOBBY and Leah Senior — a free online workshop that explored the alchemy between poetry and song.
Held on Wednesday, 6 August, this special session was more than just a writing class. It was an invitation into the creative minds of two of Australia’s most genre-defying artists, and a rare opportunity to see how poems can become lyrics, and how language lives and shifts when set to music.
Meet MOTA Lead Artists
DOBBY is an ARIA Award-winning rapper, composer and drummer blending hip-hop with Indigenous Australian rhythms, activism, and storytelling. For DOBBY, poetry is intrinsic to the form: “A lot of people would say that rap stands for Rhythm and Poetry. So, there’s a lot of wide understanding that it’s a poetic form of music.”
His commissioned piece for Middle of the Air, titled Grind, was created with that poetic rhythm in mind. “My mission with that particular poem was to bring an inherent hip hop rhythm to it. I wanted it to be able to stand on its own legs, where you can read it and understand where the syncopation was, where the emphasis on which syllables would be and it could be interpreted as both a poem and a rap lyric.”
Watch DOBBY perform the poem 'Grind'.
Leah Senior, a Melbourne-based folk singer-songwriter, brings a different — but equally lyrical — lens. Known for her evocative melodies and narrative-rich songwriting, Leah described her own creative process in contrast to poetry: “I think my voice speaks more clearly through lyric writing. When my words fall short, I’ve got music to help colour them in the way that I want them to feel.”
While she’s studied poetry, Leah sees songwriting as the place where her writing fully comes to life: “I never wind up with a really successful poem but I do, certainly, get little lines and images and things to then put in my songs.”. When questioned about how an unsuccessful poem becomes a successful song, she pondered: “When my words fall short, I’ve got music to help colour them in the way that I want them to feel. It can kind of shade everything with a certain emotional quality.”
The Workshop
Together, Leah and DOBBY guided workshop participants through the fundamentals of lyric writing — from rhythm and rhyme to voice, emotion and song structure. They encouraged writers to think musically from the outset, even suggesting that those hoping to submit work to the Middle of the Air initiative try writing to music in the background. “It’s almost as if you have written it and it speaks to you rather than you speaking to the page. So, for people looking to submit to this initiative, maybe that’s something to consider. If there is something that is being submitted to be put to music… and see what that does to the poem.” DOBBY suggested.
For both artists, authenticity was central to the writing process. “What creates a powerful work – whether it be poetry, or art or music, whatever – is honouring that self-expression. And the platform of poetry, from the perspective of a hip-hop artist, is it’s always been about telling your story.” DOBBY said. “If it feels real to you, and if it feels true, and it resonates with a particular part of your heart, then that’s going to resonate with us.”
Leah echoed that idea, citing Joni Mitchell as a guide: “She said a song has to address four spirits — something for the heart, something for the senses, something for the intellect, and some kind of poetic wit. If lyrics can do all of that, that’s going to be a really strong lyric no matter what the subject matter.”
And when asked what kind of poem she’d love to adapt into a lyric, Leah said: “Definitely rhyming is important. Much more important than it is in a poem… it gives cues as to when a statement is finished. That said, if it doesn’t rhyme, it will be a fun challenge!”
Middle of the Air: Red Room Poetry and ABC Radio National
Middle of the Air is part of a broader partnership between Red Room Poetry and ABC Radio National, bringing poems to life through music and national broadcast. Selected poems from this national callout will be reimagined as original songs by some of the country’s most exciting musicians — DOBBY and Leah among them.
The project celebrates what happens when music and poetry meet and how, together, they create something larger than the sum of their parts.
As Leah reflected during the interview: “There’s that confessional thing that I actually really love to do and then there’s using other perspectives to look at things a little more sideways.” Middle of the Air welcomes both and adds some sleuthing, as DOBBY illustrated: “What could be verses? What could be choruses? I feel like it’s a lot of clues. We’re doing investigative work, Leah and I.”
Listen to DOBBY and Leah Senior's full interview with Andrew Ford on ABC Radio National's The Music Show here.
