The Sound of Words: An Introduction to Poetry

Strategies

Audible Recognition

The overall construction of the unit is one that will allow students to develop confidence in their ability to recognize and discuss tone. They do recognize tone in their everyday lives—they know when their parents are angry, when their teacher is frustrated to a breaking point, when a friend is distraught. Beginning with a concentration on those skills of aural recognition will focus students on what they already know. The importance of sound—often left out of the discussion of the meaning of a text—will also be emphasized. As our seminar description indicates, "even apparent nonsense can communicate essential feeling and expression." In other words, there are certainly times when the sound is so important that the meaning it generates supersedes the meaning of the words, or conveys meaning without the benefit of any semantic reference. Take something as simple as the lullaby "Rock-a-bye Baby." I was singing that to my niece a few weeks ago in a restaurant as we neared a total collapse of rational behavior, and she was practically asleep in my arms, completely comforted. But consider the words of the song: It's a song about a baby crashing "cradle and all" out of a tree. Frankly, how diddid

the baby and cradle get in the tree in the first place? The "rocking" rhythm of the poem and the lulling sounds of the words completely overshadow the near nonsense of the text.

Students will initially practice the identification of audible tone unrelated to text entirely. This idea was generated as I stood in a waiting area the other day. A woman was on the phone—and she was furious. I did not recognize anything she said as she was speaking entirely—and rapidly—in Spanish. But I knew she was angry based on my recognition of an audible tone. Students can practice the identification of the tones that come from "behind the door," as Frost would say. Sample audio recordings could be generated with the foreign language teachers in the school or compiled from other available recordings.gs.

Students will then make a transition to the study of the same audible tone with recognizable words—but focusing on the fact that a particular word does not have an inherent tone; that tone would change based on the context of the words around it. At this stage they would still be focusing on their understanding of vocalized tone—looking at different ways they could say the same word or phrase, using intonation, posture, stress, etc. to convey different tones. Frost illustrates this concept in his essay on "Vocal Imagination" when he argues that the inherent sound in poetry is most certainly not "a matter of vowel and consonant sounds." He supports his contention with a detailed discussion of the word "no" which will always be spelled with the same vowel and consonant combination, but can distinctively convey different meaning based on the tone.e.⁴⁵ Frost further emphasizes his point in a letter to John Bartlett when he says that the "high possibility of emotional expression all lets in this mingling of sense-sound and word-accent."⁴⁶ He says that "abstract vitality of our speech" is purely sound. The reader must be prepared to give the appropriate "posture" to the sentence based on the context.⁴⁷ This same activity Frost initiates with "no" can be played out with any number of simple words that can be said in a variety of ways. "Yes" and "oh" are two that stand out as obvious choices for play. Peter Elbow suggests the intonation of the word "hello" as people answer the telephone—immediately we get a sense of speaker's mood and the relationship established. Elbow also suggests taking this same sort of activity to another level with simple phrases that can be manipulated in a similar way; his particular example is the sentence, "Listen to me.""⁴⁸ The ultimate goal is to focus students on the idea that tone is sound, and that it conveys meaning outside the meaning suggested by the definitions of words.

Transition to Poetry

Students will then move to the study of poetry and how the sound works organically with other stylistic elements to create the tone. To ease the transition between the vocalized sound and the written context, they will begin with poems that actually have a clear speaker or speakers who literally "talk" in the poem. Again, Frost illustrates such an example in his essay "The Imagining Ear" when he discusses the tones indicated by the farmers in "The Mending Wall." As they work on their spring repairs, the farmers, as described by Frost, speak with clear, definitive tones that emanate from particular elements of dialogue. For example, Frost describes the tone in "We have to use a spell to make them balance:/Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" as challenging and threatening.⁴⁹ Students could discuss how sound and other techniques work together to create varied tones. Any of Frost's dialogue poetry would be appropriate for this sort of discussion. "Home Burial," in particular, is a poem that would offer extensive opportunities for the dissection of tones. The poem works because, as Pinsky says, the dialogue is credible as speech, enabled by "the artist's arrangements of vocal noises at the threshold of consciousness."⁵⁰ The poem presents multiple opportunities for presentation in the classroom; one would be that students could read the two parts as sort of "creative dramatists." They might discuss the differences in how they chose to read the "parts."At this point, they should defend their discussion of the tone with references to the text. How did they decide on that particular tone? What about the context made them read the lines that way? How does the tone contribute to the meaning of the text?

Depending on the level and adaptability of one's students, teachers can present any number of strategies to assist students in the assessment of how a close reading of the written context creates this tone. The chapter on "Sound and Meaning" in Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense has a breakdown that instructors might find particularly helpful. The chapter reinforces Frost's ideas that the sound reinforces and enhances the meaning of the poem. While the strategies an author might implement are endless, the text identifies the four most common under headings with numerous examples. A poem follows each detailed explanation, and exercises direct students to specific sound issues that they can then connect to meaning.

The first category highlighted is one characterized by "words whose sound to some degree suggests their meaning."⁵¹ The most obvious example is onomatopoeia which, strictly defined, refers to words that, in theory, "sound like what they mean."⁵² The uses are limited in isolation as the sounds are typically described as "imitative." However, the chapter also points to another group of words called "phonetic intensives" whose sounds somehow, indirectly, connect with their meanings. The text provides a number of fascinating examples, such as, "An initial st often suggests strength, as in staunch, stalwart, stout, sturdy, stable" and a short I "often goes with the idea of smallness, as in inch, imp, thin, slim, little, bit."⁵³ The second category also refers to sound groupings, specifically those that the poet can use to create an effect that is "smooth and pleasant sounding (euphonious) or rough and harsh sounding (cacophonous). Vowels are often considered more pleasing and musical than consonants.⁵⁴

The final two groupings refer to the way the poet controls the pace and movement in the lines. A poet can use sound to enhance meaning by "controlling the speed and movement of the lines by the choice and use of meter, by the choice and arrangement of vowel and consonant sounds, and by the disposition of pauses."⁵⁵ The text provides an example of how Tennyson slows down a traditional meter of iambic pentameter by his manipulation of accented syllables, both in terms of placement and the long vowel sounds that "the voice hangs onto."⁵⁶ The final strategy identified is a poet's ability to "control both sound and meter in such a way as to emphasize words that are important in meaning."⁵⁷ The use of this "metrical deviation to give emphasis to important words"⁵⁸ might be particularly helpful in the prose transition.

At this point the lessons can move to a study of poetry without dialogue. Because the eventual goal is to transition to a study of prose, particularly nonfiction, the poetry will remain focused on modern/contemporary free verse poetry with a clear speaker. Again, the goal will be for students to incorporate the study of the sound of the poem with their other analytical techniques as they discuss the meaning of the text. Varied exercises can be incorporated here to encourage students to think about sound and how the context of the words alters the tone and, therefore, the meaning. Robert Hass illustrates one such exercise in his essay, "Listening and Making." To demonstrate the impact of options available in a free-verse poem, he presents multiple options for finding the "forms of closure" that might be right for the poem depending on the desired tone and emphasis. The main idea is that "for a thing to be complete, it has to change. And the kind of change indicates how you feel about that fact." He plays with a short poem by Whitman, "Farm Picture." By eliminating text and experimenting with ways to end the poem, he establishes a number of possible closures—one that emphasizes a sense of longing, one that incorporates an ironic balance, one that stresses loss, etc..⁵⁹ Incorporating these sorts of activities into this section will help students gain a fuller understanding of the varied sound elements and how they work together to create tone and meaning.

Transition to Prose

At this point in the unit, students will transition from the study of poetry to the study of prose. Looking at poetry will have made them more sensitive to language usage, especially the sound of words. In an interview published in Writers Ask, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni talks about the relevance of the study and writing of poetry as it relates to prose. She says that she is "very aware of the rhythm of prose—which is very different from the rhythm of poetry, but it's certainly there." She talks about how she is "conscious of the sounds of" her sentences and spends significant time reading them out loud to herself. If something sounds awkward, she continues working..⁶⁰ Jayne Anne Phillips speaks to the same issue when she describes herself as a "language-oriented writer" who began as a poet and transitioned to narrative. She says because of her beginnings, she has always "written line by line and with a real sense of the sound of a sentence and the rhythm of words against one another."⁶¹ The fact that so many authors speak of the relevance of the connections between the study of writing and the study of prose indicates the essential correlation between the genres.

The ultimate goal of the unit is for students to apply these same strategies for identifying sound and its connection to meaning as they analyze longer excerpts of nonfiction presented on the AP exam. The selected pieces could be from any genre of nonfiction, but for this particular transition the logical focus would be a speech—written with the intention of a verbal presentation to a selected audience—or a narrative piece of prose. One activity that could help students see the connection between the prose and the poetry would be one that we did in seminar: student could take a short piece of prose and, without changing any words, put the prose into the form of a poem. Discussion could focus on the reasons for their organizational choices—what they heard in the text that made them end a line in a particular place, establish a balance or a variation, etc. Eventually, students will fully dissect a piece of nonfiction, incorporating their recognition of sound quality as it relates to the tone and meaning of the text. t.