The Age of Sweat: Sound as Form, Sound as Toil
by Evan Harrison
Often in this collection, changes in sound represent changes in thought, or perhaps revelations. “The Ghost of Faith” fluctuates often between poles of belief, but poems like “The Age of Sweat” “Anatomy” and “Da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan” work in larger sound sections. “The Age of Sweat” for example begins with roughly textured language that presents a barrage of sounds: “minds became forested—/darkened with brush, curled in roots, / whispering with predator instinct.” The gathering of sounds—consonants formed by the tongue on the roof of the mouth, consonants formed at the lips, soft s’s and sh’s—becomes the forest. Nothing is clear, nothing can be expected—the dramatic movement of the tongue in “curled” followed by the simple utterance of “roots”, for example, creates a dissonant music. The middle of the poem, beginning at line 6, finds the speaker rejoicing (ironically?) in the affluence of his environment, thus he falls into rhyme: “cataloguing” (l. 10) / “dream” (l. 9) and “day”/”say” (l. 13). Because he is in a moment of harmony engendered by artificiality, he constructs language as such, and the listener’s ear experiences something else, something that creates expectation and pleasure. The sound of the opening section is forgotten until the final two lines resurrect its tone, and the speaker comes down from his celebration.
These various approaches to using sound closely relate to the various thematic concerns of the poems. To my personal aim, John Berryman can speak: “[Poetry aims] at the reformation of the poet, as prayer does. In grand cases—as in our century, Yeats and Eliot—it enables the poet gradually, again and again, to become almost another man; but something of that sort happens, on a small scale, a freeing, with the creation of every real poem." Rather than illustrating an emotional state or experience, these poems exist as a record of trying to understand the self in the world and the danger or uneasiness inherent in such pursuits. As means of understanding and ways of seeing fall in and out of the speakers’ vision, the sound and form follow suit. It’s easy to reduce the self and its attendant language into something manageable for the sake of a poem, but sense of self is always precarious, and inner life is usually chaotic; for poetry to mean something to me, that reality must always be recognized.
