Getting the Sound Down
The Sound in the marriage of sound and sense
© S. Ingraham and lightshedder.com
By now, most of my students will have quite a few rough drafts of poems. They
will have several things that might be poems on paper. By now the group
is naturally dividing itself into those who already have a good sense of the
sound of language and those who don’t. The few with a well developed ear
for how words go together will have already turned their descriptive paragraphs
into poetry, or will have started right out writing recognizable poems. That
is to say, they will have paid as much attention to the patterns formed by the
sounds of the words as they have to the meanings of the words. They will have
arranged their words on the page to make the sound pattern clear, and what they
have written will look like a poem. For a very few the process is almost instinctive.
For many it is intensely frustrating. They get the idea of as/like thinking.
They generate the ideas for a poem. They even come up with the basic metaphorical
language. But the actual form of poetry eludes them. What they write does not,
even in their own eyes and ears, look or sound like a poem.
Part of this is simple prejudice. Many times the only poetry they have ever
read, or perhaps, liked, was heavily metered and rhymed. The patterns were so
plain no one could miss them. They have no idea how to make their words into
something like that, and yet, they have the idea that if they don’t, what
they write will not be a poem.
To get them over this hump, I have three exercises.
On one level, I attack the problem head on, by doing an analysis of the patterns
in poetry, beginning with the visual patterns, and moving on to the patterns
of sound. You can use any good anthology or Lit text and a fairly random selection
of poems to look for the most common patterns: lines, stanzas, placement on
the page—meter, rhythm—rhyme, alliteration, assonance, etc. The essential
question to answer here is why poets make patterns with their words.
I call the activity, Getting Down to the Sound. I have several poems
of my own that directly address this issue.
On a second front we do an activity called Digging Out The Poem which,
I hope, teaches them to expose the bones of the language in their writing and
to capitalize on the patterns that are already there—built in, so to speak.
I have used the Digging exercise three different ways. Sometimes I have
them write a descriptive paragraph of their own and then dig out the poem. Sometimes
I have them dig a poem out of someone else’s description. Sometimes I just
work with the Digging method during individual conferences on their own
attempts at poems. When you dig a poem out of something they have written it
simply amazes them!
Finally, we do a lot of choral reading—reading poetry out loud together—to
train our ears and tongues and faces to recognize the essential rhythms and
sound patterns of poetry on a whole body level. I call this activity
Breath Taking, Face Shaping Poetry and it is a relatively recent development
in my teaching.
All three activities are detailed in their own sections, which follow.