It all hangs together
When I was a kid, my dad would take us down to the river, or the lake, and he’d go fishing. In the days when I was still too little to hold even my own downsized pole (the one that sits in a corner here now, in case my niece is ever interested and small enough to hold it) I’d build little cairns of stone, stacking rocks together and then on top of each other, disturbing caddis flies and algae, making short (and short-lived) towers. I’m still fascinated by stacking and cairns, although these days I also understand that except for way-markers you really shouldn’t do that. But I can live vicariously through artists like Andy Goldsworthy, whose cairns put mine to shame and whose work really is a sort of visual poetry.
You like that segue? Yeah, me too.
One of the things that makes cairns so visually appealing is the way they’re built out of same-but-different objects. That’s the root of the technique we’re exploring in this month’s poetry slam, too, as we play with consonance.
Consonance is one of the trio of “built with the same sounds” literary techniques that includes alliteration and assonance. But while alliteration forces you to match the initial sounds of words, and assonance requires you to use the same vowel sounds over and over (plus a couple soft consonants that we won’t go into here), consonance asks only that you repeat consonant (or combination of consonant like th or pr or ch) sounds anywhere in some words, often enough to be noticeable.
Read through these poems and see if you can find examples of consonance in them, and then we’ll explore the technique a little more.
Getting Where We're Going
BY JOHN BREHM
Surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting,
nipping at itself, snarling inwardly at strangers.
If I had a car in this town I’d
rig it up with a rear bumper horn,
something to blast back at the jackasses
who honk the second the light turns green.
If you could gather up all the hornhonks
of just one day in New York City,
tie them together in a big brassy knot
high above the city and honk
them all at once it would shiver
the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if
they were made of sand, and usher
in the Second Coming. Christ would descend
from the sky wincing with his fingers
in his ears and judge us all
insane. Who’d want people like us
up there yelling at each other, trashing
the cloudy, angelic streets with our
candywrappers and newspapers and coffeecups?
Besides, we’d still be waiting for
the next thing to happen in Heaven,
the next violin concerto or cotton candy
festival or breathtaking vista to open
beneath our feet, and thinking this place
isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be,
and why in hell does everybody
want to get here? We’d still be
waiting for someone else to come
and make us happy, staring
through whatever’s in front of us,
cursing the light that never seems to change.
Source: Poetry (January 2008)
The Bells
I.
Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
II.
Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!
III.
Hear the loud alarum bells—
Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now—now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling.
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—
Of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!
IV.
Hear the tolling of the bells—
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people—ah, the people—
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone—
They are neither man nor woman—
They are neither brute nor human—
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the pæan of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæan of the bells—
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells—
Bells, bells, bells—
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
From The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. II, 1850. For other versions, please visit The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore site: http://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/index.htm#B.
Scavenging the Wall
BY R. T. SMITH
When fall brought the graders to Atlas Road,
I drove through gray dust thick as a battle
and saw the ditch freshly scattered with gravel.
Leveling, shaving on the bevel, the blade
and fanged scraper had summoned sleepers—
limestone loaves and blue slate, skulls of quartz
not even early freeze had roused. Some rocks
were large as buckets, others just a scone
tumbled up and into light the first time
in ages. Loose, sharp, they were a hazard
to anyone passing. So I gathered
what I could, scooped them into the bed
and trucked my freight away under birdsong
in my own life’s autumn. I was eager
to add to the snaggled wall bordering
my single acre, to be safe, to be still
and watch the planet’s purposeful turning
behind a cairn of roughly balanced stones.
Uprooted, scarred, weather-gray of bones,
I love their old smell, the familiar unknown.
To be sure this time I know where I belong
I have brought, at last, the vagrant road home.
Source: Poetry
Sounds singing inside
Did you spot the consonance? If you didn’t, try going back and reading the poem out loud.
The good news for this month’s slam is that consonance doesn’t have to come at the beginning or end of the word or line, unlike alliteration or rhyme. So this month is going to be all about the words you love: find a perfect word to describe what you’re talking about and then surround it with other words that share sounds with it. If you don’t have 3-4 consonant words close together, though, the consonance gets lost. Let’s look at some consonant phrases from the poems above:
shiver
the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if
they were made of sand, and usher
in the Second Coming. Christ would descend
from the sky wincing with his fingers
in his ears
Listen to all those sibilants together, and look at the different places they land in the words:
shiver
the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if
they were made of sand, and usher
in the Second Coming. Christ would descend
from the sky wincing with his fingers
in his ears
Those are really packed in there, right? And yet just before you get tired of ssssssss, the poet shifts gears. Let’s look at another one:
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
Hear all those plosives? Aren’t they great? One more time, and watch for the shift:
freshly scattered with gravel.
Leveling, shaving on the bevel, the blade
and fanged scraper had summoned sleepers—
limestone loaves and blue slate, skulls of quartz
not even early freeze had roused.
The dual structure of this poem almost builds two different types of stanza: one with line spacing, and one with consonance. See how all the VVVV sounds transition to the ADE ANG APE and then ssssssssss? That’s some lovely use of consonance right there.
I don’t know about you, but part of the reason I like to write poetry is I just love words. This is a great excuse to use and center some of your special favorites. And if you spotted the consonance in that last line, you’re halfway there already!
See you on the grid!
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
