I Eat Poets’ Words for Dinner
When fiction writers attend to individual words with the same affection as poets, they can restore sound-pleasure to prose. And I promise you—it won’t come at the cost of turning the page purple.
For thirteen years, my mother was a speech pathologist; that is, for thirteen years, she understood words not in terms of their meanings, but in terms of the muscle, tongue, and teeth movement necessary to usher them into physical reality. As a fiction writer, my worldview (er, word-view?) has warped to become a lot like hers. My mother and I make our word choices most often by their mouthfeel.
While I am not versed in technical terms of the throat—though I do proudly know what post-nasal drip is—I’ve learned a lot about English language sounds by playing an unnamed word game with my mother for almost two decades now. With every round, the game has evolved. Round 1 kicked off sometime back in middle school, when vocabulary tests still haunted my Fridays. The game was simply for my mother and I to spar with words: recall a niche term, define it, then explain why we loved that word so much.
Example: “Ambivert. A person who is both introverted and extroverted. I like the meaning, but I also like that ambi sounds like Bambi.”
Another example: “Bilious. As in nauseous or gross or queasy. Doesn’t it just sound gross when you say it out loud? It makes me think of someone who’s getting gassy at the dinner table.”
Round 2 gradually focused on just declaring words we loved, and why. These words came from a shared treasure trove: 80s and 90s film adaptations of female-written classics. If there were melodramatic four-syllable words in Jane Eyre, Anne of Green Gables, or Pride and Prejudice, they were probably the heavyweight champions of Round 2. My mother and I eased many afternoons spent in parking lots, airports, and grocery aisles by exchanging such words. Some were as complex as they were in Round 1 (diametric, macabre, nomenclature), but simpler words, the under-appreciated ones, started to make appearances now too (delight and despair, tender and scruffy).
We recently unlocked Round 3 this past December, and it veers away from the loose rules of the preceding rounds. Now, we try to identify words that aren’t technically onomatopoeias—as far as we know—but ought to be anyway. For this round, I tend toward the culinary descriptors: oily, salty, buttery, crunch and crinkle, dollop and gel, melt and bloat. My mother’s more interested in the divine: behold, herald, cacophony, symphony, brass and gold and glitter.
Rounds of this word game with a speech pathologist have made me attentive to the sounds of language in ways I wish more fiction writers were. When I meet with fellow novelists down in the Google Doc trenches, they’re typically eager to discuss their characters, settings, research, and influences. All wonderful things! But when I seek a kindred spirit excited to chew the fatty gristle of the English language, I often have to scramble out of the trenches and run to the nearest poet.
It’s from poets that I learn how many calories I can pack into a sentence. The most well-known protein is alliteration, but in an undergraduate poetry unit, I also discovered the dream-team ingredients of assonance and dissonance—the repetition of vowels and the repetition of consonants. Thanks to assonance, a shallow phrase like she was happy could become her cheeks teemed with glee. Thanks to consonance, rain fell gently could become droplets pitter-pattered. The original sentences work, at least functionally, and do show up in plenty of books. But, reader, they’re boring! And they contribute nothing to the sensory experience that can and should come with reading. Say cheeks teemed with glee aloud and you’ll find the ee sound forces your mouth to smile! Additionally, pitter-patter imitates the sound of rain in a way that the word fell simply does not.
In turn, I’ve also learned from poets to be wary of using words that aren’t easily swallowed or are cumbersome when forced into an unnecessary context. Bashfully, I’ll admit that when I was a younger writer, I used to research more “advanced” synonyms to smuggle into my work; words whose definitions and proper context I hardly had a grip on, which once resulted in the unfortunately naive placement of ejaculate as a synonym for exclaim.
Worshipping “advanced” vocabulary was misguided of me, because what nutritional value can words actually have if readers no longer digest them? Though I’m delighted by the occasional appearance of an archaic word in my reading, I still prefer to seek guidance and inspiration from modern poets cooking for modern palates, who transform familiar words into delicacies.
For example, I always appreciate the diversity of vowel sounds in this excerpt from “The Superstitions,” found in Temporary Help by John Engman:
April on a canyon trail
of loose stone
that could throw you
into hypodermic ocotillo,ardent cholla: a path
to the sky, crisscrossed
by skinks. Rose, peachand lavender desert mallow.
In line 2, of loose stone sets two versions of an o vowel sound next to each other (oo and oh), while massaging the transition with soft, windy s sounds. Line 7 offers us a slant rhyme between skinks and peach, a type of rhyming that isn’t textbook perfect and therefore gives us the pleasure of a rhyme without risk of slipping into sing-songiness. Also subtly enhancing this seasoning of vowel sounds is the inclusion of the Spanish double L, the elle (EH-yeh), in ocotillo and cholla. Choosing to read these lines with the Spanish pronunciation of these plant names creates an entirely different, even lovelier reading.
Next is Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.” Every time I read this stanza, I can feel the heartbeat of the b sounds on my bottom lip. This excerpt also overflows with liquid consonants (r and l), whose sounds are produced by curling the tongue so that airflow is only partially obstructed, allowing the consonants to glide instead of strike.
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
Lastly, there’s the opening to “Salt and Sea” by Ariana Lee, which makes nearly every letter in the alphabet attractive to the tongue. This one especially deserves to be read aloud:
Mama is half a country
away and I am newly adult,
so I wash grapes, measuring salt
by eyefuls to baptize them in cold
tap water brine. I rinse, then peel
quickly, discarding the skins, shiny
from juice and curved like fish
scales. I pile their peeled, green bodies.
I drain the kitchen sink sea. Without
the skins, my teeth meet no resistance.
I eat the globes one at a time,
my tongue a patient destroyer.
Imagine the shape your mouth needs to make whenever you want to pop in a grape. Not only are your lips widened and circular, but you’re lifting the roof of your mouth too, which clears the way for deeper, back-of-the-throat sounds. Geniusly, parts of this poem require one to make the same grape-shape with the mouth when reading aloud the words wash, salt, eyefuls, cold, bodies, globes. Whenever referring to the grape’s thin outer layer, the words slim the mouth’s shape to match: peel and peeled, skins, shiny, teeth. This kind of phenomenon is exactly what my mother and I geek out over, and reward with affirming hums and head nods in our ever-evolving word game.
What I’ve come to realize is that every word a fiction writer throws on a page will be heard; perhaps through live readings or audiobooks, but most often through the interior voice that lives inside the act of reading. Precisely because this resembles the reader’s own voice, the writer is burdened with a special responsibility for every word served to the reader’s mind.
All that said, a few years ago, a novelist friend of mine politely, though perhaps condescendingly, chided me for appearing to value the sound of words over the construction of the storytelling. They were right in that the fiction form has its priorities in plot and character. This is why I try to filter my word choices through the behavior of the character, and perhaps more importantly, the behavior of the point of view. If my first-person narrator/heroine wouldn’t use the words convoluted or gnarled, then I mustn’t either. However, even if my heroine wouldn’t use those words, but my third-person omniscient narrator would, then those words become fair game. Perhaps this decision process should be clarified in fiction workshops—that sound-pleasure matters only as much as it would matter to the main character or narrator in charge of the words.
The narrator in charge of my novel’s words is sophisticated but often withholding. In the current draft’s opening, the narrator uses a series of staccato sentences to communicate and embody the texture of the highly viscous slime they’re describing—it’s a horror novel, can you tell? To evoke the right sensations, I contemplated other highly viscous textures (at least in spirit), like blubber, which led me to words like flub and glub, which feature lots of uh and b-l/l-b sounds. I also imagined peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth, then turned to words like stuck, sticky, and tacky. Those c and k sounds cling to the mouth’s interior the same way. Combine all these sensations, and here’s how those staccato sentences turned out:
The tub is filled with pink slime. Thick. Gummy. Pocked with the concaves of burst bubbles.
Still, through all these meticulous line edits, I’ve been fretting that I value the wrong craft elements as a fiction writer. Recently though, a poet friend shared with me that poets are also taught to write beginnings, middles, and ends. Poems should be telling stories too, however fragmented and brief those stories may be. So, if poets are encouraged to care equally about the sound and the story of their words, then I hope novelists can start to feel that encouragement too. Do not assume my adoration for liquid consonants equates to caring little for plot and character. On the contrary! Plot and character have three liquid consonants in them already.