CHAPTER THREE

Sound

“Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening.” - Craig Morgan Teicher

Sound is biological. We are bathed in it before we’re born; create spoken languages; compose and listen to music. If a song comes on that you like, you might start singing along, not even realizing how many of the lyrics you know. But, when was the last time you started reciting a familiar written document like a chapter from your favorite book or a letter? Because of tone, rhythm, and rhyme, music is more easily memorized and recalled. It’s really a series of patterns formed by rhythm, sound, and sometimes rhyme.

Poetry's evolution from music results in its riches of rhyme, alliteration, assonance, meter, and is pinned to poetry’s very lyric impulse. Sound play is one of the delights of listening to and writing poems. When a poet works well with sound, it’s said that they “have a good ear,” meaning they can bring to the surface subtle work with sound.

Just how important is sound in poetry? You might be familiar with the children’s poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll (1832–1898). There is the made up creature, a “Jabberwock” with “eyes of flame,” and some kind of altercation happens in the poem. A good portion of the poem contains nonsense words such as “vorpal,” “uffish,” and “brillig.” However, when read to children, they swear they can follow the action. When my children were young and I read it to them, they described the epic battle between a red dragon and a knight. The words may be nonsense, but what reading this poem out loud illustrates is that sound has meaning independent of the words.

Rhyme

Some consider rhyme to be almost synonymous with poetry. Historically, most verse was written in rhyme. Across many cultures and time periods, and artistic movements, poetry rhymed. However, writing strictly rhyming verse is not something many contemporary poets practice. Many students who are new to poetry assume that poems are supposed to rhyme, perhaps because they were taught older poems by a well-meaning secondary teacher as they covered a requisite unit of poetry and rhyme.

I often tell my students that no art is made in a vacuum. Art is both a mirror and criticism of the culture in which it’s created. At the turn of the 20th century, many movements within the Modernist era were wildly experimental, and privileged expression over meaning. It’s no wonder art takes a wild turn, so does the world, as it enters a period of rapid change. The fields of chemistry and medicine move forward, electricity is harnessed. Automobiles, airplanes, telephones, to name a few devices, are invented. The world stage is set for the first of two world wars. In visual art, the works of Salvador Dalí and surrealism, as well as Pablo Picasso and Cubism come to mind. Literature is no exception. Rhyming poetry begins to fall out of fashion, aided by the influence of the French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) and expat American poets Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) introduce exciting new verse that doesn’t rhyme. By the 1950s the Beat poets had all but put most rhyming poetry to bed, yet rhyme isn’t dead. Rhyme is still very much a part of formal verse and slant and half rhyme at the end of lines, as well as the middle of lines is common and adds a delight for the ear.

If you think all poems must rhyme, please reexamine this notion. This is not to say that poems can’t or shouldn’t rhyme. In fact, we’ll cover rhyming forms in chapter five, and writing in form is an important practice for poets. This is to say, that if you insist on using only rhyme, be aware of the consequences. If you work with rhyme, what drives the decision for each line is a specific ending sound for the line. If your line is, “Across the night prairie, an aching moon,” then the next line you write will be searching for a sound that rhymes with “moon”: loon, dragoon, so soon, etc. So when you’re searching for the rhyming sound, finding that sound becomes the dominant driver for the next line, which means you could become closed down to figurative opportunities, wild images, or a surprise turn that occurs when your focus is on making the last syllable of words rhyme.

Rhythm and Meter

You don’t see rhythm on the page, you hear it when you read the poem, especially if you read out loud. Rhythm is an audible pattern created by intervals between stressed syllables. English is a syllabic language, meaning some syllables are stressed and others unstressed. For comparison, other languages, such as Mandarin, are a pitch-based language, so the meaning of the word is derived from the pitch or register at which the syllables are spoken. In polysyllabic words (words with more than one syllable), one syllable receives more stress than the others. The easiest way to count syllables is to say the word out loud and each drop of your chin indicates a new syllable. If you say hotel, your chin drops at the “h” and “t,” so the word “hotel” is composed of two syllables. Across a line of verse a pattern of accented syllables emerge across all words, whether monosyllabic (meaning one syllable) or polysyllabic.

Meter is a measurable rhythmic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse. When measuring meter, better known as scansion, look for two things: the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, this is called a metrical foot. Secondly, count how many feet are in a line. There are names for these feet. As we look at the feet, this mark ‘ will represent a stressed syllable (think of it as the beat of a drum, using the sound boom) and this mark ̆ will represent an unstressed syllable (think of the soft ba of a lamb).

Below are the metrical feet

Iamb is a two syllable foot with the pattern of unstressed and stressed: ̆ ‘ (ba-boom) Note: Iambs or an iambic rhythm is the most common foot in English. Again, I think this is biological, as an iamb, ba-boom, imitates the lub-dub of a human heart.
Trochee is a two syllable foot with the pattern of stressed and unstressed: ‘ ̆ (boom-ba)
Spondee is a two syllable foot with the pattern of stressed and stressed. Note: this is not a common foot, and when it appears, it is usually in the beginning, middle, or end of the line: ‘ ‘ (boom-boom)
Anapest is a three syllable foot with a pattern of unstressed, unstressed, and stressed:

̆ ̆ ‘ (ba ba boom)

Dactyl is a three syllable foot with a pattern of stressed, unstressed, unstressed: ‘ ̆ ̆ (boom ba ba) and it’s worth noting that this is also a pretty rare foot, but appears more so than a spondee.

Once you’ve determined what the metrical feet are, next determine how many there are in a line of verse. Recalling the Greek prefixes from geometry class will come in handy for this: mono for one foot in a line of poetry, di for two, tri for three, tetra for four, penta for five, hexa for six, octa for eight. It is convention to use a forward slash to mark the feet. Below is what scansion looks like in a line of poetry, from Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 130. You’ll notice that there are five feet and they are all iambs, creating a line of unrhymed (because it does not rhyme with the following line in the sonnet) of unrhymed iambic pentameter.

̆ ‘ / ̆ ‘ / ̆ ‘ / ̆ ‘ / ̆ ‘

My mis/tress' eyes/ are no/thing like/the sun;

Poets.org has a comprehensive and understandable resource to read on meter.

Vowels vs. Consonants

The difference between how we pronounce a vowel sound versus a consonant are substantial. To pronounce vowel sounds (go ahead and try and notice what your tongue and lips are doing: a e i o u y) the sound is created by the tongue and lips’ movement, no teeth are involved. To pronounce consonants, there are more movements involved, often with lips, teeth, and varied air flow. There are voiced and voiceless consonants; for example the “th” at the end of “teeth” is voiceless and the tongue goes through the teeth to make this sound, whereas the “th” in the word “the” is voiced and stays behind the teeth. To make a “b” or “p” sound, a plosive, you have to put your lips together and force air out as you open your mouth. To make “f” or “v” sound, a fricative, your top teeth touch your bottom lip and you have to vibrate air through this space. There are many more delightful categories for English phonetics and phonology, but the paradoxical take away for poetry is that consonant sounds slow a word down, since there’s more work to do to make the sound, whereas vowels speed up a word.

Say “bat,” and you’ll notice the consonant starting and ending require more mouth movements and thus more time to say the word. Now say “oar,” a word that’s two-thirds vowels, and without stops between the teeth and tongue, the word is quicker to say. Vowels are often described as liquid and constants as a stop; think of languid pouring versus the bump at an encounter.

Another paradox is that polysyllabic words are quicker to say, whereas monosyllabic words slow a line down. You would think that shorter words, those with one syllable, would move faster, but they don’t because there’s more stopping and starting to say the words, so a line of poetry with many monosyllables is a slower line. Take a look at these two five syllable lines from the same poem “The baby pig” by Shannon Ballam from a previous chapter.

monosyllabic line: his coat. It stuck out

polysyllabic line: concentrating hard

You probably noticed that in the monosyllabic line, three of the five words ended with the hard sound of “t.” In a reading she gave at UCLA, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Kay Ryan said, “Every word brings it kith and kin,” and of course this means synonyms, but also words with similar sounds, like the short words from Ballam’s line that end in “t.” Poetry’s early connection to music is still apparent in vestiges of rhyme, meter, verse, and other sonic qualities, even the sounds of letters in the words a poet chooses.

Sonic Literary Devices

There are literary devices related to sound, which also help create rhythm in poetry. Anglo-Saxon poetry is filled with alliteration, which was more of a guiding aesthetic than rhyme. Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds, usually in the beginning of the word or the accented syllable. Let’s look at “The baby pig" by Shannon Ballam again. Here is a line with two bits of alliteration, “s” followed by “h,” “Stubbs saw her heart.”

Assonance is the repetition of similar vowel sounds in close proximity, and usually these vowel sounds are in the middle of words. Here’s an example from Ballam’s poem, where you’ll hear the long “i” in “fine” and “line,” as well as a long “a” in “a” and “gray,” “mouth a fine gray line.” Assonance is a subtle sonic device, but worth tuning your ear toward.

Onomatopoeia is a word formed from the sound it describes; for example, the sizzle of hot oil in a pan. To say “sizzle” sounds like the action of the hot oil. Many children’s books use onomatopoeia: the buzz of a bee, the ba of a lamb, likely because imitating these sounds is closely connected to language acquisition. Used in poetry, a just right onomatopoeia is arresting, as in Dickinson’s famous poem 591 with the eponymous title and first line: “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -”.

Poets often speak of having a “good ear,” which means attention to sound. The more you read and write, the better tuned your ear will become. Poetry is meant to be read out loud, so next time you’re reading a poem, perhaps the ones in this text, read a few outloud and listen to the sounds.

Exercise 1: Scan & Mimic

Think of a poem that has caught your ear. Even a line or two from this poem suffices. Look up the poem and write or type it out. One of my teachers, Dean Young, insisted on the practice of typing out his favorite poems, as well as his drafts, on a typewriter. The typewriter is a literal rhythm. Do your best to scan the poem. You will recall that most feet are iambic. Identify the metrical feet and count how many feet there are per line to determine the pattern. Mimic the scansion in the poem you will write. Also, feel free to borrow from other sound play. Use alliteration and assonance. Repeat or introduce an expected rhyme.

Exercise 2: Tune your Ear

Most writers keep some kind of notebook, whether it’s post-its on a nightstand, a moleskin in a pocket or purse, the notes app on their phone, or something more formal. I once taught a creative writing class using the Observer’s Notebook Series, which offers notebooks to observe weather, home, birds, a garden, etc. The idea was to observe and record, to really get into the Beginner's Mindset as it connects to writing. Go to your notebook and gather a few lines that interest you. Let these lines start a poem and let the words in the lines invite their sonic “kith and kin.” Think of rhythm, rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, syllable count, vowel versus consonants. The words don’t have to make sense per se, you’re selecting them for sound. If you don’t keep a notebook yet, borrow a few lines from the ones my students and I recorded in our Observer Notebooks from the weather series below.

the wind carried the snowflakes upwards
alto-cumulus afternoon
a lasting power of a happy childhood
cloud blanket of all the grays
this marriage of sunrise
sudden nothing, then bursts of wind
anatomy of a tornado
he saw only anvils in the sky
we saw each other, but did not understand
historical magic

Exercise 3: Focus on the Vowels

When I first learned of Gadsby, a 1939 novel written by Ernest Vincent Wright without using the letter “e,” the most common letter in the English language, I can’t say I was compelled to read it, but the exercise was intriguing. For this exercise, focus on the vowels in your poem. Assonance often gets second fiddle to alliteration, perhaps because the repeated sound is inside the word, rather than at the beginning. The sounds in the middle are inherently more subtle. Remember that vowels, compared to consonants, lengthen a line, so this is an opportunity to work with long, liquid lines.

Poetry