Learning Sound Devices from Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee -- a rock star in the poetry world.  I'm a huge fan, so when I saw that Lee was reading in my state, I packed my suitcase and drove five hours. 

That evening, he read poems and mused about poetry.  He read with a measured, deliberate tone.  Then he talked, pausing a lot and thinking aloud.  He said that we speak poems with the outgoing breath, which is the dying breath.  Maybe he meant that we make art out of death.  Or we make art out of life passing through us.

Back in my room, I propped myself on the bed and reread his work.  I noticed a deliberateness on the page.  An intentionality that I'd hurried over.  Now I slowed down and read the poems aloud.  With his voice in my mind, I noticed an attention to sound that had escaped me before.  I noted the shape of my mouth pronouncing each word.  I listened to air leaving my body, sculpted by vocal chords, tongue, and teeth.

Here's the first stanza of "Early in the Morning" from Lee's 1986 book, Rose.   In just eight lines, I hear a lot going on.  Vowels ooh and ahh.  Consonants thump and click.  Here's a look at the assonance alone:

Early in the Morning
by Li-Young Lee
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.

And check out the consonance and alliteration:

Early in the Morning
by Li-Young Lee 
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.

There's more.  Did you see the rhyme in lines one and two?  And the repetition of "before"?

I notice, too, that these eight lines make one sentence.  But Lee withholds the main part of the sentence until line six -- "my mother glides an ivory comb."  That's a long way into the poem!  How does he sustain momentum for five lines before finally coming to that main clause?  With rhythm, he builds a ramp that launches line six.  Let's ignore the line breaks and look at the phrase lengths:

While the long grain is softening in the water (long)
gurgling over a low stove flame (short)
before the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced for breakfast (longer)
before the birds (shorter)
my mother glides an ivory comb (we've arrived!)

The longer phrase pulls the energy farther out, then compresses back into the shorter phrase like a spring, ready to release the heart of the sentence, "my mother glides an ivory comb."

Another thing.  By breaking the lines in the middles of phrases, Lee pushes us forward at the ends of lines one through four.  We're in suspense, so we read on to find the phrase ending, then another phrase begins and we must read across the line break to find ITS ending.  Momentum accomplished.

Last observation.  I like the way Lee lets us rest for a moment on line three, the half-way point.  The rest stop is "low stove flame."  These single-syllable words make a platform on which we can land and from which we can leap into the next phrases.  Take a look.  Without that rest stop, we wouldn't make it all the way to the sixth line where the kernel of the sentence is waiting.

Early in the Morning
by Li-Young Lee


While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.

With that kernel, Lee has answered our curiosity.  We no longer wonder where the sentence is headed.  Having arrived, we're refueled enough to go on through lines seven and eight to the end of the sentence.

So how can we make our next eight lines as amazing as Lee's?  One way is to tickle our reader's ears with 1) vowels that echo through the line  2) consonants that repeat themselves  3) rhyme and repetition 4) line breaks in the middles of phrases  5) creating momentum and rest stops.

Li-Young Lee's work can teach us much more, but I've got to stop typing this and work on a poem!  If you've discovered a favorite technique in a Lee poem, please share it.

What the Judge is Looking For

A renovated warehouse + cookies + guitar music + people reading poems.  It adds up to a lovely evening at Trinity Valley Community College's Poetry Festival.  I just drove home from it, and I can report that the creative vibes of the evening are still with me!

To celebrate National Poetry Month, TVCC invites a poet to give a reading and judge their student poetry contest.  The top student poets receive recognition, and all the poems appear in a journal.  This year, I was honored to be their visiting poet and judge.  THANKS to everyone who made the event such a success!

As I listened to the winning poems tonight, I remembered the qualities that made me choose each one.  A great image here, a clever line there.  An unusual topic.  A musical cadence.  They sounded even better in person!

In the back of my mind, though, I also recalled poems that fell short of their potential.  Actually, I didn't recall the poems themselves, but the missteps that landed them in the "no" pile.  Any of the contest entries could have been great poems, but only a few stood out.  How did those few grab my attention?  I'll tell you.

A few weeks ago, a bulging envelope arrived, and I sat down with a two-inch stack of poems.  My assignment: whittle it down to ten.  In the first pass, I hoped to find
1) sensory language that made me imagine sights, sounds, smells, and taste
2) metaphors, simile, personification, or other figures of speech
3) interesting topic choice
4) concrete details
5) sound play beyond predictable rhymes

With this, I eliminated more than half.  Poems that used all abstractions or rhymed in a nursery way, I set aside immediately.  Poems about love (which was most of them!) got boring fast.  Very short and very long poems felt like drafts.

Next, I reread.  Now I looked for:
1) complex emotional situations
2) heft or gravitas in the issues raised by the poem
3) humor that made me laugh, but also revealed a new perspective
4) a strong voice that used fresh language
5) harsh situations articulated with harsh sounds, like "t" and "ck"
6) gentle situations articulated with gentle sounds like "sh" and "w"
7) meaningful line breaks
8) meaningful arrangement on the page and use of white space

This gave me a stack of about twenty.  I read a third time and a fourth.  Only a handful of these twenty revealed a little more every time.  Those turned out to be the winners.  Poems that kept me coming back.

I've judged about twenty contests in recent years, and I'm going to confess something:  There's no foolproof way to rank or even fairly compare equally solid poems.  Sometimes a clear "best one" emerges, but more often I'm left agonizing, trying to find a reason to choose one over another.  At this point, each judge will go with her gut.  For me, this means asking myself crazy stuff like which poem I would want a copy of or which poem I wish I had written.  I might feel pulled to poems that touch on experiences I've had or philosophies I agree with.  I might pick a poem that seems more novel and unusual or one that attempts something challenging.  It's just plain unpredictable.

But, this is comforting.  It means that your poem might be very good and still not take first place.  Once it's polished to shine as much as possible, you can relax and not worry so much about what the results mean.  I enter contests, too, and I'm going to try taking my own advice.

Meanwhile, I hope the students at tonight's Festival enjoyed themselves, win or lose.  Just the act of writing is life-affirming and worthwhile.  To all the writers in that room:  Stay creative and keep writing!