We talked last week (and, well, every week before that) about sound in poetry. Obviously, each poet decides for her or himself (often from poem to poem) if the bulk of a poem's energy will come from narrative, lyricism, imagery, etc. But to better illustrate how sound and imagery can work together, take a look at this famous poem by Marge Piercy that relies almost entirely on sound and imagery.
Touch Tones
by Marge Piercy
We learn each other in braille,
what the tongue and teeth taste,
what the fingers trace, translate
into arias of knowledge and delight
of silk and stubble, of bark
and velvet and wet roses,
warbling colors that splash through
bronze, violet, dragonfly jade,
the red of raspberries, lacquer, odor
of resin, the voice that later
comes unbidden as a Mozart horn
concerto circling in the ears.
You are translated from label,
politic mask, accomplished patter,
to the hands round hefting,
to a weight, a thrust, a scent
sharp as walking in early
morning a path through a meadow
where a fox has been last night
and something in the genes saying
FOX to that rich ruddy smell.
The texture of lambswool, of broadcloth
can speak a name in runes. Absent,
your presence carols in the blood.
A great way to refine your own aesthetic, not to mention develop a more technical appreciation for poetry (see also the Pinsky line, "Read the way the chef eats"), is to perform an explication of a published, well-regarded poem. In other words, go line by line and theorize on what the poem is (or isn't) doing. Another big benefit of this is that once you've come up with a detailed, hopefully complimentary explication of a poem, you have something nice to send out to journals (National Poetry Review is interested in explications) or at the very least, post on your blog to show everybody how smart you are.
To see some examples of explications, check out my explication of the above poem, which also contains info on the midterm (due Feb. 25), as well as my explications "To Pull into Oneself as into a Locked Room" by Stephen Dobyns and "Waiting" by James Valvis. You should also check out my lesson on scansion, since that's another time-consuming but very effective way to develop a deeper awareness of what's going on in your or someone else's poems.
And now for something completely different...
Touch Tones
by Marge Piercy
We learn each other in braille,
what the tongue and teeth taste,
what the fingers trace, translate
into arias of knowledge and delight
of silk and stubble, of bark
and velvet and wet roses,
warbling colors that splash through
bronze, violet, dragonfly jade,
the red of raspberries, lacquer, odor
of resin, the voice that later
comes unbidden as a Mozart horn
concerto circling in the ears.
You are translated from label,
politic mask, accomplished patter,
to the hands round hefting,
to a weight, a thrust, a scent
sharp as walking in early
morning a path through a meadow
where a fox has been last night
and something in the genes saying
FOX to that rich ruddy smell.
The texture of lambswool, of broadcloth
can speak a name in runes. Absent,
your presence carols in the blood.
A great way to refine your own aesthetic, not to mention develop a more technical appreciation for poetry (see also the Pinsky line, "Read the way the chef eats"), is to perform an explication of a published, well-regarded poem. In other words, go line by line and theorize on what the poem is (or isn't) doing. Another big benefit of this is that once you've come up with a detailed, hopefully complimentary explication of a poem, you have something nice to send out to journals (National Poetry Review is interested in explications) or at the very least, post on your blog to show everybody how smart you are.
To see some examples of explications, check out my explication of the above poem, which also contains info on the midterm (due Feb. 25), as well as my explications "To Pull into Oneself as into a Locked Room" by Stephen Dobyns and "Waiting" by James Valvis. You should also check out my lesson on scansion, since that's another time-consuming but very effective way to develop a deeper awareness of what's going on in your or someone else's poems.
And now for something completely different...
One way to
refine your aesthetic… and, well, get better at stuff… is by seriously attempting
something that is more or less impossible.
So with that in mind, let’s try an exercise based on some poems I
selected off Verse Daily.
If
you’re not familiar, Verse Daily is a
site that, each day, republishes one poem selected from all the copies of journals
and recently published books that are sent their way. They tend to publish a wide range of styles
so obviously, not everybody’s going to agree on the subjective quality of each
piece.
Still, in
the interest of sharpening your aesthetic and quite possibly starting an
argument, I’d like you to read these pieces and try and nail down some kind of
reason for why you think each piece is “good” or “bad.”