I recently wrote a blog entry for Brian Brodeur’s valuable “How a Poem Happens,” (http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com) a collection of many blog posts from myriad poets—many very well known—that ask the same series of questions. My entry centered on “Barn Gothic,” published a while back here at Shenandoah. One of the questions centered on form and application:
“How did this poem arrive at its final form? Did you consciously employ any principles of technique?”
This question proved difficult to answer and elicited a peculiar response. R. T. Smith suggested I expand the answer to explore the process by which this poem came to be while synthesizing the central idea in Brodeur’s blog.
As I noted in “How a Poem Happens,” I am obsessed with sonic lushness—if, for example, I go to a poet to read for pleasure, it will most likely be Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, early Heaney, etc. I love circuitous, complex applications of sound, so much so that in recent years certain sounds summon synesthetic experiences. For example, I pair certain consonantal repetitions (particularly “w” and “s” and “l” sounds) with the sight and smell of flora. I think instantly, for example, of Hopkins’s “When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush,” a line that conveniently marries my synesthesia with the actual motif. This line is delicious to me. I savor it and could say it again and again, which leads to my next idiosyncratic relationship with sound.
I am a fan of verbigeration, the nonsensical repetition of words or phrases. While I never apply this technique within my own poetry, in life I do repeat certain words—some as benign as “and”—over and over until they lose their meaning and take on a purely sonic simplicity. I liken it to staring at someone or something for so long that they take on an otherworldly radiance, simultaneously lose a certain context and yet gain another one as an object that transcends their mere tangibility.
Such practices have their drawbacks. Even in short-lined poems such as “Barn Gothic,” as I noted in “How a Poem Happens,” I’m perhaps overly conscious of imbuing each line with sonic dynamism. The result is often that my poems, relative to other the work of others now being published, appear (or sound) antiquated.
One fellow poet recently wrote to another fellow poet that I was a poet of “old traditions.” I’m not sure what this means, other than to suggest that I am conscious of form to the degree that my work sounds “old” not in its lack of originality (I hope), but in its prolixity or its ornamentation.
I find much contemporary poetry boring, and I flinch at such a general admonition—but it’s true: most of the work I encounter in journals seems like lineated prose. There’s an argument in my mind about the “truth” of poetry—what it’s meant to say, and many writers argue that poetry needs to sound like someone talking, someone relaying the message to reader in a way devoid of adornments. It’s not that I don’t believe in the validity of this style: I appreciate that it exists, but I won’t read it when I encounter it. I don’t think the purity of truth is in proportion to a transcription of actual experience, but just as likely to emerge through a purely imaginative and lyrical exploration—the latter of which opens more possibilities (in my case) for interesting—and mostly not completely purposeful—applications of sound.
For me, sound need not be limited to idiosyncratic sound relationships as in Hopkins, but can be enjoyed in a less pyrotechnic way. One reason, for example, that I love James Dickey’s early work is his reliance on the anapest, which gives his work an almost engine-like quality, a sound-fuel that creates tension, energy, builds to a revelatory climax.
Simply put: I can’t separate my life from my preoccupation with the sounds of words. I find them strange and incantatory, and I enjoy poets who seem to apply them in similar ways (the very ornamental Eric Pankey, the dynamic Betty Adcock, the hewn expansiveness of Steve Scafidi).
— William Wright
