What do you hear when you look deeply into this photograph of a lake I hiked to in Colorado last summer? What do you hear when you read a poem to yourself, or out loud?
“I do know when a string of printed words busts
my little dam and the tears spill over and I sponge them up with my T-shirt. I
couldn’t give you that formula before it happens, it just hits me like a bat to
the face. That’s a sweet, hot, amazing, embarrassing moment.” – Neko Case
Do you want to write lines and sentences that have that power for your reader, that overwhelm the senses of the reader?
Let's focus on sound for now. What are the elements in writing language on the page
that help a poet create music in the line, the sentence, the poem? How do you manage meter,
rhythm, rhyme/echo, cadence, syllables, stressed and unstressed syllables,
syntax and enjambment and runon sentences, punctuation or lack of it?
“The sonic effect of every poem, whether we call it
formal or free, traditional or innovative, depends on a concerted relationship
between stressed and unstressed syllables, between syllables that may or may
not echo one another: these effects are the material result of the poet’s
manipulation of the medium. In order to describe or produce a poem’s tone, a
poet can’t think profitably about tone; a poet must think about the linguistic
elements that produce a poem’s tone, most prominently rhythm and echo, just as
a painter who wants to achieve a certain quality of light must think more
precisely about the nature of paint”- James Longenbach
Read this poem by Ross Gay out loud to yourself or a friend, and hear the playfulness and joy dramatized by the music of the language:
A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music
My Friend Has Given Me
By Ross Gay
—for Patrick Rosal
Because I must not
get up to throw down in a café in the Midwest,
I hold something like a clownfaced herd
of bareback and winged elephants
stomping in my chest,
I hold a thousand
kites in a field loosed from their tethers
at once, I feel
my skeleton losing track
somewhat of the science I’ve made of tamp,
feel it rising up shriek and groove,
rising up a river guzzling a monsoon,
not to mention the butterflies
of the loins, the hummingbirds
of the loins, the thousand
dromedaries of the loins, oh body
of sunburst, body
of larkspur and honeysuckle and honeysuccor
bloom, body of treetop holler,
oh lightspeed body
of gasp and systole, the mandible’s ramble,
the clavicle swoon, the spine’s
trillion teeth oh, drift
of hip oh, trill of ribs,
oh synaptic clamor and juggernaut
swell oh gutracket
blastoff and sugartongue
syntax oh throb and pulse and rivulet
swing and glottal thing
and kick-start heart and heel-toe heart
ooh ooh ooh a bullfight
where the bull might
take flight and win!
Below is another example of a poet trying out various
sounds available in the syntax of a short sentence (They taste good to her) and the different implications or tones the sentence can enact in the poem. The poet is using enjambed lines, rhythm with stressed syllables,
short lines, a minimum of punctuation, and sound echoes:
To a Poor Old Woman
By William
Carlos Williams
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
How can you write a line that adds to the music of the
language? Syntax, enjambment, and where the line breaks helps the reader
understand how to sound out the rhythm and cadence and stresses in the poem.
Echo also adds to this musical quality, how a line or poem is “heard”. This can
be called the sonic quality of a poem.
Syntax is the order of the words in the sentence. Rhythm
is created by which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed in your
line and sentence. As you write with line breaks, you are asking yourself how
you want to manage the stresses on the syllables, how you want to use rhymes
(echoes of sound in the poem), how you want to indicate rhythm (a cadence) to
your sentences in the poem.
I’ve taken these examples above from an article by
James Longenbach titled The Music of Poetry. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92652/the-music-of-poetry
Three Tips for creating music in your writing:
1. As
you write and re-enter your writing, and possibly revise, consider playing with
many different ways of ordering your poem. You can write with a different
syntax. You can enjamb your sentences so that a sentence runs right into the
next in the middle of a line. You can cut all punctuation to see how that
affects the pace of your poem. You can add echoes of a sound to your poem.
2. Marie
Howe has said that she will sometimes write her draft poem in stanzas of four
lines and work on creating end rhymes. Then she will re-order everything so
that the rhymes occur within the lines instead of at the end of the lines. In
this way she has added internal sound repetitions and avoided an overly obvious
sing song effect. She will increase the sonic quality of her language in this
way.
3. You
can also try changing which words are stressed in your sentences. How would you
do this? Maybe you play with what is stressed by changing the line breaks, or
the order of words in a sentence, or you use rhyme differently. All these
elements of your writing are tools that you can employ to build the music in
the text on the page.
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