A Word Involves the Whole Body

An inseparable but special part of the feeling of words lies in the fact that they have to be produced by a human body — with an exception noted for parrots and the like. The act of producing a word involves breath and muscle, and various kinds of muscular activity tend to produce various kinds of feeling. Thus, aside from all other considerations, the bodily involvement in sounding the word is a distinct part of the word’s personality. “Elate” feels one way and “thud” feels another. So for sheets, burble, spit, clack, snip, bang, buzz, alleluia, prestidigitation, indubitably, liquescent, uluate, majestic, and anything else one cares to cite from the total language — some words involve more specific and localized muscular play than others, and some have their denotations more involved in the resulting sound than others, but every word has a muscular feel of its own. When the muscular play tends more or less definitely to enact the denotation of the word as in “prestidigitation” or “oily” (one has only to protract the “oi” sound to produce an oily suggestion), then the word may be called mimetic. When the sound of a word imitates the sound of what the word denotes (as in buzz, link, splash, crunch), then the word may be called onomatopoetic. Any conversation attentively linstened to will offer examples of both kind of words. The more excited the conversation becomes, the easier it will be to see in the emphases and gestures of the speakers how the muscles and the nervous system are involved in the process of spech and its meaning. —John Ciardi and Miller WilliamsA Word Involves the Whole BodyHow Does a Poem Mean?)

A charming presentation of formalism, which presents literary study not as the investigation of what the poem means, but rather how. Diction, metaphor, rhythm, counterrhythm, and form, all in the service of what Ciardi calls a performance.

The book uses horse-racing examples, which at first made me think the book was dated. I can’t help but think of Nicely Nicely from Guys and Dolls: (“I got the horse right here/His name is Paul Revere!”)

Then I noticed the introduction advocates always teaching two poems together, never one alone, so that a student can always see a comparison. Suddenly the horse-race metaphor makes more sense.

3 thoughts on “A Word Involves the Whole Body

  1. “Can do, can do–this guy says the horse can do. If he says the horse can do, can do, can do.”

    I played “Big Jule” in Guys and Dolls–of course, we changed all the masculine pronouns, and the big reveal was fun with my long hair tucked under a fedora :-)

    This book sounds like an oldie, but a goodie–I might have to procure a copy once my indebtedness from buying books for classes clears…

  2. This is also why Ciardi’s translation of Dante is considered one of the best (even if I do like Niven’s take on hell better).

    PS – “Or make it Epitath/he wins it by a half/according to this here in the Telegraph.” I _love_ Guys and Dolls.

  3. Ciardi’s original book is from 1959, so it IS outdated. But it’s also a classic, and well worth a read (by poetry teachers, at least). Some of it is a stretch (eg his explanation of the “mimetic”) and some of it over-romanticizes classic forms, but any lover of language would love this book, I think. Sound is crucial to poems and far too often overlooked. I spend at least a week on this stuff in my Poetry Writing course and it’s a lot of fun to teach. Once you start thinking of the body as a musical instrument, the rules of the game shift away from word play and creativity becomes less abstract and something more organic (though the more one relies on “organic” expression, the more one betrays his belief in “natural talent”…which I don’t believe in, personally…there’s no gene for iambic pentameter, as far as I’m aware). And to extend that to formalism (and the organic conceit that always lies behind it), not every writer knows how to pronounce a word “correctly” — and everyone speaks in a different key — so there is no ideal standard of sonic rhythm in “the text itself.” I’d argue that a deaf-mute could probably write good poetry — Ciardi might not agree. Nevertheless, the expression of sound puts the muse in music and this is an imperative topic for poetry students to understand.

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