The poet build his poem up from sounds. One may get an idea, inspiration from a scene, a picture, a poem, or a line from a novel or news story, be obsessed with a word, or otherwise find motivation to write a poem, and one may even write a few lines or even a full first draft without considering sound, but in the end, with rewrites and revisions, it is the sounds that drive the poem. It is this obsession with the sound of words that makes a poet choose to be a poet rather than a writer of prose.
Sounds, along with rhythm, are what contribute to the music of the poem. They help it to dance. With songs, you will have a musical instrument (or many) that provide much of the music, as well as the singer's voice. In a poem, though, you have to rely on the words themselves, to their natural rhythms and to the combinations of sounds.
But rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and consonance not only help to make the work musical, they also help contribute to the meaning, help it to mean. As Edgar Allen Poe understood, different sounds evoke different emotions. Poe famously stated that the long O was the most sorrowful sound. Poe's O will slowly grow into deep sorrow along the poem's flow. Please note that, even with the content not having an emotional aspect, the line nevertheless probably felt at least a little sorrowful to you.
Of course, sound associations are going to vary from language to language, culture to culture, and even among individuals. But I would be surprised if there were not some commonalities, a family resemblance among sounds and emotions to at least some degree. We all sigh or make a kind of mumbled growl when we're annoyed, for example. But sighing can also express sorrow or sadness, depending on the context--but the sigh of annoyance and the sigh of sorrow are different in their sounds.
If you are going to use sounds to communicate some element of your poem, you'll likely have to play around with it and try your poem out on different people and ask them how they felt when they heard the poem. Poems are a form of communication, and they communicate more than the poet consciously intended--if it's in fact a good poem. It's therefore important that we communicate what we intend to communicate when it comes to sound. A comic poem full of long O's will probably not work particularly well. But who knows? Maybe you can pull it off.
This is so true. In the 1990s, I wrote about 1000 pages of poetry in a style I called "tonal cinema". It was mostly made up of short lines, following a metric, but not always strictly.. and I went solely by sound. The images were kind of absurdist, but I called it a cinema because it was all about the stream of images that the short lines created, and it was like watching an actual film "film" go by, because of the short lines.. So anyway I called it "tonal cinema" because it was based on the tones, and the stream of images they created.
ReplyDeleteI would just hear the sounds in my inner ear and would just write them down. Years later, though, I stopped hearing the sounds, and unfortunately stopped writing poetry. Part of the reason was that people told me they didn't "understand" my poetry. I was frustrated by that because all they had to do was "create" the images in their minds, by reading the lines.. but I guess they were too lazy to do it, since it was after all a little surrealist or absurd.
Some of the lines were longer, but it was always a wall of text, square I mean.. and long, without breaks, like a strip of film.. Like I said, though, I was never able to get back into it.. I still wrote lyrics for my songs, though, and the odd sonnet or something of the sort, but I never went back to the tonal cinema.. which I consider unfortunate because I had a lot of fun doing it back then.
I learned, though, not to let it stop me if people don't understand. Now I don't really care, I do what I feel like doing as an artist. I realize that there is an audience, and that it matters that I cater to the audience to some degree, but I don't let the audience choose my subjects or whatnot, or my style. I'm the one who spent his life studying the arts, I think I'm qualified enough to do the choosing. I just think that I can't ignore the audience entirely either.. it's a bit of a tug of war.. or a give and take relationship if you will. I rely on their feedback, so I can't ignore them entirely like I said. I'm sure you understand. :)
Nota bene: I'm enjoying this blog, by the way! Keep on going on! :)
Sounds like an interesting style. I will be writing a poet sometime on the effects of surrealist imagery in poetry on cognition. The key is to build your audience. You don't have to meet them exactly halfway, but you do need to give them an in. And of course, once you have an audience, you can bring them further and further along. Think of it as blazing a trail.
ReplyDeleteGlad you're enjoying it. Share it with everyone!