A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape.
~ Robert Pinsky1
Here’s part 1, if you’d like to read that first (but it’s not necessary).
Idea: Relax?
As writers, many of us (including myself) tend to take our writing really seriously. We’re super hard on ourselves, we judge our writing harshly, we expect way too much for ourselves. So as we start August, let’s try being playful, ridiculous even, in our writing. Let’s go over-the-top.
How? Let’s try out four fairly ridiculous sonic devices:
The more sophisticated dissonance and phonetic symbolism, and their fun, rowdy cousins, cacophony and onomatopoeia, respectively.
Any device can be used subtly, but these four lend themselves to extravagance, so why not lean in? The results can be cutesy but they don’t have to be—they could in fact go in the direction of exaggeration and commentary, such as can be found in the works of the great caricaturist George Cruikshank (b. 1792, d. 1878).
Cacophony
This refers pretty specifically to the use of individual harsh or discordant sounds. In English these might include harsh consonants like b, d, g, k, p, s, and t, and consonant blends like ch, sh, tch. Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Colossus” uses a lot of these harsh consonants, especially b-sounds and k-sounds, to great effect. Here’s the first verse:
I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It's worse than a barnyard.
Dissonance
This refers to when the overall sound is organized to create a jarring effect. To achieve dissonance, you might employ cacophony but also other devices simultaneously like fixed stresses, monosyllabic words, consonance (especially with harsh consonants), and perhaps especially, rhythms that feel more brutal or unrelenting.
Think of a parent saying angrily, in a stilted manner, “get back in here and apologize!” Those first four words are monosyllabic and each one would likely be stressed when uttered, as in, “get! back! in! here!” with a probable extra oomph on those “g” “b” and “ck” sounds, and on the final “p” in “apologize.”
But a passage doesn’t have to be made of angry expressions to be dissonant:
A ball—coughed up by some curb-kid's bat—bent a clean, cold arc through the bar, smashed the bottles above the burner, then picked through the shards like a church mouse through pews before it stopped by the foot of a broke wretch on a stiff bench who picked it up and spat.
Challenge:
Employing cacophony and dissonance, as well as any other sonic device that seems useful, write a preposterously punchy, discordant, clunky, stressed, uncomfortable poem. Don’t be afraid to be ridiculous (you can always tone it down later!). If you’d like topics, try one of these:
how to climb a mountain (as a goat? as a turtle?)
a debate between you and your political nemesis (or a monologue by or description of your political nemesis)
Phonetic Symbolism
When the very sound of a word conveys a meaning, we refer to this as phonetic symbolism. Think of it like the positive (or at least neutral) side of the implicit bias coin. Implicit bias is when we unconsciously associate stereotypes or ideas with people. Phonetic symbolism often happens when we unconsciously associate ideas with sounds.
For example, all the following words use the sound “gl-” to convey shinyness or slickness: glow, glaze, gleam, glimmer, glare, glisten, glitter, glacier, glide. English speakers will likely already have an unconscious association of this sound with this meaning. We can then imply shinyness or slickness with words whose meanings do not convey slickness but whose letters do contain the same sound—words like glory, glee, glut, globe, and gland.
Bouba/Kiki Effect
Another way the sound of a word can convey meaning is through a kind of synaesthesia that’s been theorized to be inherent in humans. Some populations of people have been shown in studies to consistently associate the visual shapes of objects with the sounds of their names. For instance, which of these shapes do you think is called Bouba and which Kiki?
Studies2 have shown that participants have consistently pointed to the spiky shape as being “Kiki” and the rounded shape as being “Bouba.” So when you use words, you can keep this in mind and use it to your subtle advantage, to convey what something or someone is like—either literally or metaphorically sharp or dull (and in all the manifold meanings of those words). And I’m guessing there are other sonic associations that haven’t yet been studied!
Onomatopoeia
This is the fun kid cousin (and a sub-form) of phonetic symbolism, which you may well have learned in school or at least been exposed to in children’s books. It’s when words directly imitate sounds:
animal sounds/calls/songs (arf, meow, honk, moo, ribbit)
verbs and nouns that sound like the action/thing they describe (buzz, chatter, growl, howl, murmur, sizzle, flipflop, hiccup, click, crunch, smash, thump, hush)
Challenge:
Try writing an absolutely fabulous (i.e. silly and overly rich) poem (or verse, or couplet) using both phonetic symbolism (when the sound of a word conveys meaning) and onomatopoeia (when words imitate sounds). If it’s helpful to have a topic, here are three to choose from:
a busy restaurant’s kitchen
a playground on an alien world
an argument or temper tantrum
As ever, I’d love to hear from you about these newsletters, your poetry, or requests for future topics—for this newsletter or for a class or workshop. Reach out by leaving a comment below, or email me anytime at ecblair@gmail.com.
I hope you have a relaxing August!
~ Elisabeth
P.S. My first book, a poetry memoir about the years I spent in the troubled teen industry, because God loves the wasp, is available for pre-order from Unsolicited Press directly, from Indiebound or Amazon, or by ordering through your local bookstore.
https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/2009/09/golden_grammar.html