The Age of Sweat: Sound as Form, Sound as Toil
by Evan Harrison
Poetry blandly defined is “concentrated imaginative awareness of experience chosen and arranged to create an emotional response through its meaning, sound, and rhythm.” In The Age of Sweat I give particular attention to the way that sound informs meaning in free verse poetry. Since sound is included in the definition of poetry, don’t all poets pay attention to sound? In short, yes, but the ways in which poets use sound are radically different.
Many know poems primarily as they exits on the page. Poets use typography and spacing—the white of the page—to create a visual-rhythm and influence meaning. Poets such as Cummings and Apollinaire (in his concrete poems) need to be experienced on the page—much of their intention is lost otherwise. But even a poem like Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole,” which begins as follows, flourishes on the page:
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
In a poem so strikingly focused on the speaker’s absence, the presence of the poem itself must be called into question. Strand does this using short, significantly lacking lines (“this is” is the most extreme case) that hardly exist, and certainly cannot exist independently. It appears as if the poem is the speaker, and the white of the page is the field.
In this collection I’m not interested in the pressure of typography on the meaning of the poem. I don’t “disagree” with poets that experiment with typography (or use it for any visual effect, as simple as dividing a poem into stanzas). However, to draw attention to sound and the need for the poems to be heard required, I feel, a strict formula for putting the poems into type. Thus the poems appear on the page in stanzaless, left-aligned form, punctuated to inform the oral presentation.
Form then exists in the deliberate gathering of phonemes, stresses, and silences. Allow an analogy: seeing a painting in a book differs greatly from seeing a painting in person; in person, the presence—the awe—is part, but one can also get close to see the texture of the paint on the canvas and the fine details that it creates. Similarly, when lines are formed with attention to metrical moves, repetition and contrast of sounds, and onomatopoetic connotations of sounds, the lines sound textured. This texture works to enforce certain images or ideas so that the language can be concise but still carry significant weight. This excerpt from Yusef Komunyakaa’s “The Nazi Doll” exemplifies the idea of texture in sound:
It sits lopsided
in a cage. Membrane.
Vertebra. This precious, white
Ceramic doll’s brain
Twisted out of a knob of tungsten.
It bleeds a crooked smile
& arsenic sizzles in the air.
Its eyes an old lie.
Here the rhyme, assonance, and the blending of hard consonant sounds and long, open vowel sounds push connections between words, allowing connotations to echo through the poem. Furthermore, discomfort—a sense of the doll’s insidiousness—arises from the unpredictability of the words and their sounds. Pronouncing the poem is almost painful. Sound fuses with meaning.
