A Recipe for Sound

I would describe myself as a page poet. By this, I mean that my poems work better on the page than they do at a microphone. I am not a performance poet and, more importantly, I don’t aspire to be one. I’m instinctively shy and just convincing myself to stand in front of a room full of people is challenging, then asking me to read poetry is even more difficult. But I do it. I stand at the microphone and read my page poems. I do it because it’s always good to do something that frightens you – throws you outside of your comfort zone – and when you survive, it makes you realise that you can be stronger than your greatest fears.

I’m a page poet that likes sound. That cares as much about how my poetry sounds as the way it looks on the page. I don’t just look, but I listen as well. I read aloud as I’m writing, feeling the lines rolling off my tongue and changing anything that doesn’t ‘sound right’. However, regardless of how much I like sound, it needs to work in conjunction with the overall meaning. It can add strength and emphasis to a poem. But on its own it will never add the depth and the multitude of layers that I love within poetry.

I can use sound to give a poem a specific feeling. I can manipulate assonance or alliteration, not only to accentuate a line but, also, to impart harshness or softness. If I consider syllables – stressed and unstressed – and place them in a given order, then I can create rhythm. If I use a string of monosyllabic lexemes in short lines, then I can create the illusion of speed, haste, panic. Therefore, I would argue that sound is as important to poetry as a line break – although probably not as important as the connotative meaning of individual words.

Recently, my mind (usually in the early hours of the morning) has been thinking about a new analogy for poetry. Like a simile it can allow you to think about things in a different way, and this can often enable you discover something new, something that you hadn’t considered before...

Poetry is like cookery. You start off by following recipes, weighing everything out and following each step. Then once you’ve mastered the basics you begin to experiment: taking what you’ve learnt from the recipes and applying it to something new. You learn the rules before you start to break them.

Cookery is about balancing ingredients, while poetry is about balancing words – with all their meaning, sound and power. If you get the balance wrong, it creates something that is inedible. For instance, it doesn’t matter how much you love spices, with all their autumnal colours and vibrant scents, if they’re used without a degree of skill then you’ll create something that fails to function as a meal. The very same philosophy is applicable to sound. It doesn’t matter how much you love sound, if you don’t achieve the right balance with poetry’s other ingredients then ultimately the poem will fail to fulfil its full potential.

Poets should be aware of sound, should employ sound techniques, and should care about the overall sound of their poem. But, equally, sound should be used like a spice: with care and caution.

Thank you for reading,
Lar

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