Words, language—that’s what poems are made of. It’s so obvious a fact that we tend to pass over it quickly, which is a very bad idea in relation to poetry. In our everyday lives, we tend to think that language is pretty transparent and user-friendly—we don’t think much about it; we just speak it. We say we read a newspaper or an article on Wikipedia, but often what we’re really doing is skimming it, zipping across the surface of meaning rather than deeply registering language and phrases. And that’s fine for day-to-day purposes, up to and including schoolwork or research. But language in poetry calls for our full attention. Faced with the obviously complex use of language in poetry, it’s easy to become confused and even intimidated.
The raw material of poetry is words, is language. In order to take in the implications of that fact, it might be good to step back from the topic a bit. Let’s imagine for a moment that we wanted to be a painter or a sculptor. We’d learn pretty early on that paintings have traditionally been made out of oil paint applied to canvas or wood panels with brushes or other tools; that the raw material of sculpting is often clay or some kind of rock and tools to work with it. Oil paint, clay, stone—these are the materials of those arts (at least in their traditional terms in the West). It’s hard to imagine a painter who doesn’t have a gut pleasure in fooling around with paint, or a sculptor who doesn’t experience pleasure feeling clay beneath her hands or chiseling away at the surface of stone. Poets, too, are deeply connected to the materiality of language—they love to give their tongues over to the sounds that words make. And I’d advise young poets, shy though they often are, to permit themselves to sound aloud the poems they love and the poems they’re trying to write. Give yourself over to that pleasure of making sounds and rhythms, and know that it is inseparable from poetry’s power to matter to us.
FOUR CATEGORIES OF LANGUAGE USE IN POETRY
But there’s more than just the pleasure of sound-making, because language is more complex a phenomenon than paint or stone (though I mean no disrespect to painters or sculptors). Let me return to the analogy with a young artist working with pigment. When it comes to painting, there’s color (the hues the artist places on the canvas) and there’s the theory of color. Without understanding color theory, it wouldn’t be possible for a painter to mix all her colors out of a basic few. When I say “color theory,” I don’t mean anything fancy. In fact, the color theory I’m thinking of is so basic that most of us learned it in third grade art class, where the teacher informed us that out of the three primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—we could make three complementary colors (red + blue = purple; blue + yellow = green; yellow + red = orange), and from there on we could further mix and blend to create a huge number of other colors. As I say, this is so basic that it’s almost laughable, and it may seem even highfalutin to call it a theory. But words are as basic a material to a poet as colored pigment is to a painter. Yet we’re never taught a simple, basic “theory of language” that we can use as poets or readers of poetry. So I’d like to propose one—a very basic “theory of language use in poems” that isn’t intended to impress or persuade linguists or academics, but one that I hope will serve to guide poets toward a better and more gratifying sense of the wonder they experience when reading poems or writing them.
For the purposes of this book, I want to set up four categories of language use in poetry: Naming, Singing, Saying, and Imagining. If we come to understand what these four kinds of language use sound and look like and what they can do in a poem, then we’ll have gone a long way toward understanding how poems can so often delight and disturb us in urgent ways. Let me offer brief explanations of each of these terms before considering them at greater length.
Naming refers to the fact that we use specific, agreed-upon words to refer to things in the world. In English, we say “tree” when we want people to direct their attention (either their eyes or their mental attention) to a certain kind of vegetation. We might be standing with someone on a street and say, “Look at the way the wind is thrashing the branches of that tree.” The word tree directs our listener’s (or reader’s) attention toward that object. If you say, standing on the same street, “Look at the way the wind is thrashing the branches of that penguin,” your listener would probably not know where to look, although I’m guessing he would look mostly at your face and possibly step back away from you a little bit until he could figure out whether your odd word choice indicated something odd about you that he hadn’t suspected before. We live in a world full of material objects, and we use words to name them and thereby orient ourselves among them. Likewise, we use language in a naming way to describe actions; for example, the movement of walking is different when it’s named as “stumbling” rather than “striding.” We also have a more limited number of experiences that are mental and emotional rather than physical, but that we also have names for and use in a naming way: “grief” or “regret” or “joy” or “loneliness” and so on.
Singing refers to the fact that words are sounds we make. Not all sounds we make are words, but every word can be a sound, can be pronounced aloud. When words are put together, they create a series of sounds—and when spoken aloud, a rhythm. This aspect of language in poetry is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “musical delight.” He said that a poet had to be born with it, had to experience it as a primary pleasure. Not only must the poet experience this pleasure, but she or he must also have the power to make others experience it: “the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it” (emphasis added).
We don’t always say words aloud. Many people read poems silently to themselves, although they must be making those sounds inside their brains as they read them. But of course, when we sound words out loud, we can become aware of their qualities as sounds—harsh or soft or capable of making patterns such as rhyme or alliteration. Singing has to do with a poet’s awareness of the sounds (and silences) involved in language use and the use of this sound aspect for expressive purposes. Where the Naming aspect of language clearly makes communication between people possible, the Singing aspect has a lot to do with emotional expressiveness and the pleasure we take in sounds and phrases. When I say “Singing,” I don’t actually mean what a person does with melody in a song—it’s not usually that stylized a use of voice—but it’s a metaphor for language that is alive to the pleasures and possibilities of sounds and sound patterns.
Saying refers to the way we use language to make statements and claims about ideas and concepts. Language in a Saying mode can have enormous authority because it gives a sense of real intelligence, conviction, and insight. When someone says something like “Friendship is at the heart of a good marriage,” the listener does her best to bring together those two notions (friendship and good marriage) and test them against her own experience, but she’s also persuaded by the tone of authority and confidence with which those words have been put together. A part of us hungers for and takes pleasure in assertions about experience and human nature that are expressed as ideas or insights. “A coward dies a thousand deaths; a brave man dies only once”—that’s emphatic and worth considering as an idea. (There’s also a bit of Imagining in that statement, since those “thousand deaths” of the coward are probably the imagined deaths the alleged coward undergoes as compared to the brave person who doesn’t waste time imagining what awful thing might happen to him, but simply and bravely acts.) Saying is also complicated by the fact that even though we’re impressed by the authority and confidence of Saying language, we sometimes resist the fact that it calls for us to accept the sayer’s strong opinion. Many of us would rather be the source of Saying language than the person who’s listening to it and yielding to its force.
Imagining refers to the very strange ability that humans have to compare one thing to another thing. I’m referring to metaphors and similes—to figurative language in general. People use metaphors and similes all the time, and we seem to derive pleasure from this kind of language use. “That guy is a trainwreck,” I overheard someone say just a moment ago. Even dead metaphors like the one I just quoted have the power to enliven our daily conversations—how much more exciting it is to encounter the new and unexpected comparisons that poets specialize in.
Naming, Singing, Saying, and Imagining—these are things people do with words, with language. Poets are fascinated by what words can do when arranged into certain patterns and organized for certain purposes. Are we experts or specialists in language use? I don’t know. Not in the way that I think that advertising writers or political speech writers are. We aren’t necessarily specialists in manipulating our readers with different kinds of language. Or, if manipulation is a temptation for anyone who uses language a lot, then I would say that we as poets are partly protected by our sheer love of words. If manipulators of language (and people) use words and phrases to put their listeners under a spell, then poets are people who are themselves under the spell of language. We poets are the first to be spellbound by the magic of language, and if we’re lucky, we pass along that magic to our readers in the form of poems.
Naming, Singing, Saying, Imagining. These four kinds of language use are layered or mixed into poems in varying proportions depending on the poet and the poem, so that what results is the rich complexity of meaning and sound that we recognize as a poem. Different poets emphasize one or another of these powers—they give their loyalty to, or feel excitement about, one or two qualities of language more than the others, perhaps. But no good poet is unaware of all four of these qualities, and many of us use them all in varying proportions in order to make our poems strong. These qualities are not totally separate things, and the terms I’m giving for them are my own, though I hope they’re simple enough to be understandable and useful to someone eager to make words into poems. My presenting these four qualities as distinct aspects of language is a calculated misrepresentation in pursuit of a clearer sense of the wonder of language in poetry. In fact, these qualities can be roughly distinguished from one another; yet in actual language use they aren’t distinct, but mingle and braid and overlap in the rich flow of speech or writing.
I want to make one final thing clear before I begin discussing these four powers of lyric language. They aren’t part of a formula for a sure-fire poem. I’m not saying there’s a recipe for poetry that goes like this: “add one passage of Saying to three lines of Naming and top off with one dollop of Imagining; season with Singing and simmer for three-quarters of an hour in a half-baked brain.” Nor do I think any poet has ever constructed a good poem according to any formula or recipe like that. Here’s my point: I think these four qualities account for some of the marvelous things language does in poems, generating the concentrated power and liveliness that are at the heart of it. If you recognize and respond to the presence of these forces in poems you love, then that recognition will make it easier for you to release similar forces in your own poems. I’m speaking here about intuition and (imitative) love, not analysis. If you can use these qualities analytically to study a poem or write an essay about one, and if they help you to gain insights into the ways the poem works—the way energy manifests and moves through a poem—that’s wonderful. But if these four qualities give you insight into poems you love and inspire you to experiment with making similar language—that’s even better.
NAMING AND SINGING: A BASIC DUALITY OF WORDS
I’ve just claimed that words are powerful in a fourfold way in lyric, but I want to approach this fourfold nature by first discussing a primary duality of words that concerns all poetry: Naming and Singing. Most words designate something—some object or action in the world as we know it. Not all words designate or name, but it’s an essential function of language. Likewise, every pronounced word is a sound, a noise we can make. The word bridge is a sound in English, but it also designates an architectural structure—it’s not just a sound. The word bridge on a road sign that says “Warning: Bridge is out” indicates clearly the absence in the world of the thing it names, and a reader of that sign is alerted to a real danger.
Words are often used to point toward things (Naming); words are also sounds (Singing). This is a basic duality of language. It’s sometimes interesting to ask young poets this: If you had to choose, would you choose accurate language (the language of precise naming) or pleasurable and emotionally evocative language? Would you rather write lines that are precise in their naming, or would you rather create lines that are a rich unfolding of sounds and rhythms? Of course, we probably want both in our poetry (though not all poets do), but you can see that the inclination or preference is a real one. A poet could decide to value Singing above Naming, or Naming above Singing—and the poems that result from this preference would be different and distinct.