In my poetry group we have been playing with sound, writing a poem where we are asked to focus on one or two vowel sounds (as in: how now brown cow) or a one emphasizing consonance (as in: hickory, dickory dock). The process can be torturous–trying to get the sounds and the meaning of the poem to jive in any way, trying desperately not to go down the road of the nursery rhyme or commercial jingle. Sometimes making sense has to go by the wayside. If the sounds work well enough to bypass the rational and can penetrate at a cellular level where there is an instinctual knowing of what the poem conveys then there is a kind “visceral” sense that occurs. Another way to approach a sound poem is to let the sounds reveal the meaning as you write them.

We are very reactive to sounds, they influence our moods, our nervous system, and our state of mind whether we are aware of them or not. Sounds like crack, back, rap, tap, whip, pick are hard sounds and produce a particular response: a tension, an alertness. Words like blow, cloud, want, stall, lawn, down are gentler, we lean back, they flow over us, rather than coming at us in a straight trajectory. When the sounds of a poem support the narrative or the emotion the reader will resonate, will connect with their own experience more quickly and deeply. It’s like a built-in surround-sound system, enhancing the visual with dolby stereo.

One of the masters of the sound poem was Gerard Manley Hopkins. His poems are wild and wonderful and entirely unique to him and his sense of how a poem can be made. One of my favorite poems of all time is his Pied Beauty. It brings me into a space of awe and a playful kind of wonder at the many forms of creation. I have also included some notes on Hopkins sent to me by my friend, Hilda (one of my poet-group mates). These notes were excerpted from a book she was reading on Hopkins to better understand how he did what he did and why.

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Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh firecoal chestnut-fall; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; a–dazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

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I also offer a poem I wrote for the above-mentioned poetry group exercise on consonance. Coming to the poem was a very useful process that will serve many poems in the future. If you have any favorite sound poems or you’ve written one yourself, email me with it or write a comment and include it there.

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Eros with Pistol
The sight
the squeeze
the crack the

wrack the smack
kickback
the lick

of it the spit
of it split of it,
the track

contact to
impact to shatter
to scatter

to scraps to
bits that skitter
that litter to

splinter rend
bend strip rip
apart part

yet

the heart
the heart
beats back

beats back

beats back

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Gerard Manley Hopkins (Image taken from Wikipedia)

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The following information on Hopkins is taken from an essay by Frances Fennell called “The Terrible Crystal”
that is in the collection of essays on GMH called The Fine Delight, Centenary Essays on the Poetry of GMH (published in 1989).

Enduring Strengths or qualities of his poetry are:

• Originality of voice and vision
- He has a unique voice. No one sounds like him.
Example: I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon
- His uniqueness has appeal. It sounds like him and likable. Endearing per FF.
- Uses alliteration, assonance and colloquial diction
- Per FF, He prized his distinctiveness of voice and deliberately cultivated it.
I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, … more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf…Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling.
- Avoided other’s style: “The echoes are a disease of education, literature is full of them; but they remain a disease, an evil.”
- Ideas and approach are unique. Example: in “Spring and Death” he juxtaposes contrasting ideas; per FF he blends regret and acceptance

• Command of language
- Coins new words: shivelights, shadowtackle, (in That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire)
- Hyphenates to create new word ideas:
Hurrahing in Harvest
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! What lovely behavior
Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift molded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, or rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

- Heightens ordinary speech; obsessed with language; sees language as pliable
- Values words for their ability to suggest by sound or by analogy to other words and meanings, but avoids cheap effects. Does not let alliteration & assonance trivialize the poetry by turning it into an incantation.
- Uses sound to help establish meaning
- Uses language to express the ornate (baroque) aspect of the sacred.

• Immediacy
- Absorbed in the now. Rarely nostalgic.
- “In tasting every moment, Hopkins through his poetry textualizes himself, and triumphs over his often dismal and banal everyday life.”
- Very sensuous, direct, physical orientation to his content
- Wants reader to sense (see, hear, smell, taste, feel) the content
- Photoerotic; causes the reader’s eye (physical & mental) to experience pleasure
- Earnest; determined to be candid, even confrontive. Speaks directly (with feeling, even beseeching) rather than ruminating to himself. Hopkins says:
“A touchstone of the highest or most living art is seriousness; not gravity but the being in earnest with your subject—reality.”
- Seriousness must be about oneself and one’s own experience. Lack is per Hopkins “the deepest fault a work of art can have.”
- Integrates and transcends the masculine and feminine. Presents the archetypally feminine self by using a variety of voices, formats & devices.

• Craftsmanship
- Rigorous standards of perfection.
- Gives his short pieces a fine degree of finish. Small and polished.
- Went through many drafts
- Weighed the effects of each consonant and vowel; researched and experimented with words from a wide variety of sources, mastered the intricate relationships of form and structure.