Sherry Chandler

Phonetic Intensives

I learned a new term in Beth Ann Fennelly’s KyWWC session Four Ways Poets Can Use Sound to Make Meaning: “phonetic intensives.” This term is a partner to onomatopoeia; it refers to suggestive phonetic combinations. For example: “fl” words (flare, flame, flicker) suggest moving light while “gl” words (glow, gloom, glare) suggest light that is still.

Fennelly emphasized a toolkit of sounds to control the speed and mood of the poetic line: euphony, cacophony, liquid and plosive consonants, long and short vowels, meter, and poetry’s version of the rest, the caesura.

We had a test, too, in which we were given two very similar couplets from poems by the canonized, e.g., Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Gray. One of the couplets was authentic, the other a very clever counterfeit and the test was to pick the “real” lines. I proved myself still the star pupil by identifying 8 out of 10. Sort of pathetic, really – 40 years out of high school and the gold star is still important to me. I confess, though, that it was a team effort and I got particularly lucky with my table mates: Jan Isenhour and David Cazden. The gold star was a candy necklace.

The poem that I’m putting up this week, “Gravitas,” plays with sound. And I’ve been playing with sound recording, too, having learned a trick or two from the web goddess. If luck holds, I’ll put up an mp3 so that you can hear this poem as well as read it. You can even download it to your iPod and I can say, “Look, Ma, I’m podcasting!”

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