Music lyrics (and, among the various genres, rap lyrics specifically) are often viewed as some kind of modern poetry, while previous research has also emphasized the conversational nature of song lyrics. At the same time, Amanda Gorman’s poetry, for instance, has been assigned a “song-like” quality. In order to address the issue whether the verse represented in poetry and song lyrics actually share similarities, this contribution intends to highlight commonalities of and differences between the two genres from a linguistic perspective. To this end, text-linguistic findings from fields such as register studies, stylistics and literary linguistics are combined, with a view to exploring the potentials of both manifestations when it comes to the teaching of linguistic structures.