Hi all,
I know it’s been a terribly long time since my last post. I apologize for that. But I’m back now. I’ve been trying to settle down up in Thermopolis now that I’ve moved, but I’ve also been spending my weekends away — packing, visiting family, etc. As a result, I’ve been doing far less writing (of any sort) than I would like. I’ve written few poems, read few books, and this is the first time I’ve sat down to write out another blog post. Sometimes it’s a little too easy to become lazy. And, to continue with the trend of making excuses, it’s hard to want to do anything in a house whose temperature is surely north of ninety degrees when I get home. Excuses aside, I haven’t stopped thinking about poetry, even if I haven’t been writing much about it, and it’s good to be back after some time away to continue my little series of posts regarding repetition.
As indicated by my previous posts, this one is concerned with the theme of repetition as music. Music in poetry can be a difficult thing to talk about. At least I find it to be so. There’s only so much that can be done regarding the science of what makes words sound nice (or not nice) together. Of course, the music in poetry goes well beyond repetition of words. This sort of music is created by meter, by rhyme, by alliteration, assonance, consonance, vowel pitch, etc. Some of these (perhaps all of them) are formed by repeated patterns. This is no mistake. Music, as we understand it, is highly reliant on patterns and repetitions. There is a TED talk somewhere that discusses this and in order to prove it, the speaker wrote a song completely devoid of repetition. In the end, it’s unclear whether or not we can really call it a song, and even if we can, it’s a really bad one. Bad in the sense that it’s not at all musically appealing, that is.
When we look at music in poetry, we see the same tropes as in instrumental and vocal music. A great number of these are due to repetition. There are two poems that I think do a great job of showcasing these things. On the front of repeated words, we have Sylvia Plath’s “Snakecharmer”, and as regards sounds, we have Franny Choi’s “We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had”. Technically speaking, both of these poems showcase both repeated words and repeated sounds. However, I think that they work as particularly good examples of the categories I have put them in. Of course, there are a great number of other poems that would work just as well to showcase how repetition of sound creates music, these are just two favorites for the purpose. (Another set of examples to look up is Christian Wiman’s poems in the January edition of POETRY where each of the poems makes strong use of the repetition of sound.)
Here is Sylvia Plath’s poem in full:
Snakecharmer
As the gods began one world, and man another,
So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere
With moon-eye, mouth-pipe. He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.
Pipes water green until green waters waver
With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.
And as his notes twine green, the green river
Shapes its images around his songs.
He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues
Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes,
Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom
Of his mind. And now nothing but snakes
Is visible. The snake-scales have become
Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast
Of tree and human. And he within this snakedom
Rules the writings which make manifest
His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes
From his thin pipe. Out of this green nest
As out of Eden’s navel twist the lines
Of snaky generations: let there be snakes!
And snakes there were, are, will be—till yawns
Consume this piper and he tires of music
And pipes the world back to the simple fabric
Of snake-warp, snake-weft. Pipes the cloth of snakes
To a melting of green waters, till no snake
Shows its head, and those green waters back to
Water, to green, to nothing like a snake.
Puts up his pipe, and lids his moony eye.
One of the first things to notice about this poem is the heavy repetition of words. In particular, words like “pipe”, “snake”, “green”, and “water” (in their various forms) make numerous appearances. The way they are repeated puts the reader into a sort of lull. I see this all throughout, but most heavily in the first two stanzas where it says “So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere / With moon-eye, mouth pipe. He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water. / Pipes water green until green waters waver…” Clearly, this makes use of more than just the repetition of words, the repeated s sound in the first of those lines, the i and m sounds in line two, and the repeated w sound in the last of them, there are a number of different things working in concert to end up with the music that occurs. But so much of what happens here is dependent on the repetition of words in similar and dissimilar orders.
One of the benefits (and the challenges) to writing in this way is that it allows the meanings of the words to slip somewhat into the background, foregrounding the reader’s musical ear. Considering the meaning can be made by sound as much as by words, it is possible for a poem to slip completely from linguistic comprehensibility into the strange world of meaning through sound creation. Plath’s poem doesn’t go so far. There is still a clear story replete with images and allusions. Other poets such as Gertrude Stein have taken the musical side of things to the extremes.
While such a thing is wonderful in its own right, it can also cause a reader to be distracted from the actual meaning of the words themselves such that they can come away having felt something, but not knowing what in the world the poem was actually about. But I digress. The point, really, is just that the repetition of words is one way in which repetition creates music in poems.
In a place even closer to traditional music, we have poems that are more sound-focused than meaning-focused, where the sounds of the words rather than the words themselves are what create the poem. This is what I take to be happening in Franny Choi’s “We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had”. Though the words have meaning, that meaning certainly seems of secondary importance to the poem. Before I talk about it more, here is Choi’s poem in full:
We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had
we used our words we used what words we had
to weld, what words we had we wielded, kneeled,
we knelt. & wept we wrung the wet the sweat
we wracked our lips we rang for words to ward
off sleep to warn to want ourselves. to want
the earth we mouthed it wound our vowels until
it fit, in fits the earth we mounted roused
& rocked we harped we yawned & tried to yawp
& tried to fix, affixed, we facted, felt.
we fattened fanfared anthemed hammered, felt
the words’ worth stagnate, snap in half in heat
the wane the melt what words we’d hoarded halved
& holey, porous. meanwhile tide still tide.
& we: still washed for sounds to mark. & marked.
I find the use of w words and the repetition of low vowel sounds to be incredible here. As a result, I, as reader, can feel something moving beneath the surface of this poem. It took quite a few reads through the poem to actually make myself pay attention to the words themselves because I was just so caught up in the sounds the words made. Though I don’t do this for all poems, I continually found (and still find) myself forced into the physical formation of the words with my mouth while reading.
Not unlike when listening to instrumental music, I found myself lulled into a sort of trance as the poem continued. The fact that the poem pushed me into shaping the words amplified this effect. It creates an unavoidable rhythm — the thudding of a drum, so to speak. This, of course, is only made more pronounced by the poem’s being in iambic pentameter. Such a lull is dependent on repetition. The same is understood to be true in classical music (and, indeed, most music). Part of what is necessary to music is regularity, repetition. In softer pieces of music such as Philip Glass’s “Etude No. 5”, what pushes us toward a meditative state as listeners is the quiet thrumming of repetition. There is modulation, modulation is necessary (you can’t really just listen to hours of someone just hammering middle C at quarter note intervals). But the central theme is the repetition. And when the repetition is so deeply ingrained, its breaking brings extra attention.
This is, after all, how music is stored on CDs and how our brains work. We don’t pay attention to what stays the same. What is recorded or noticed is what changes, what varies from the baseline. So when Choi’s poem moves from mostly w words and low vowels to a fleeting interest in f words, we home in on that. Extra attention is given as the music modulates upwards to this new key where we “… tried to fix, affixed, we facted, felt. / we fattened fanfared anthemed hammered, felt.” Following this, we drop to s and h words with “the words’ worth stagnate, snap in half in heat” before settling back down into words beginning with w once again, a repetition which is maintained until the end of the poem.
And honestly, if asked what the poem is about, my answer still reverts to sound and vague gesticulations. Usually, such an inability to clearly state what a poem is about after spending time with it leaves me feeling that a poem has not been sufficiently clear. But this is not always the case, as I think this poem demonstrates beautifully. Sometimes poetry is about word salad that verges on subvocalization. It may do me good to remember that more often as I write, as that is a tendency which I rarely give into.
That may be all I have to say for now. Hopefully my next post won’t be so long out as I continue on the topic of repetition.
Thanks for reading. Take care.
— D.C. Leonhardt
(Note: The picture is of a handwritten copy of Mary Cisper’s brilliant poem “Winter Birds” which was published in the 45th edition of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.)
Today’s pen and ink pairing: TWSBI Eco (B) and Papier Plume Bayou Nightfall
