The Sound and the Fury

Do you think that you can't have the full experience of a poem unless you hear it out loud? You may be right.


Do you read your own poetry out loud? You should.

I'm sure you've heard this many times before, but, since a poem is (usually) relatively short, every little thing about it matters. What words you choose, the way they look on the page, the way they work together and the way they sound.


Different poems emphasize different things–some are about the meaning (or lack of meaning) in the words, some are all about the line breaks, some really draw their meaning from the way they look on the page (a great example of the last is Vivek Shraya's "even this page is white" from her poetry collection of the same name). But fewer poems place a really strong emphasis on the way a poem sounds. Sure, some formal poetry (by which I mean poetry in a metrical form, not poetry in a tuxedo) is written in a certain meter. Sure, there are repetition and hard sounds and soft sounds. But have you ever heard anything like this?

As you might have guessed, it's in French. But it probably didn't take a great deal of French knowledge for you to hear how often the words "père" (father) and "mère" (mother) repeat throughout this poem. Of course, the poet, Grand Corps Malade, spends a great deal of time talking about mothers and fathers in general, but this poem is filled with puns and layers of meaning expressed purely through sound. Here's an example:

At one point, Grand Corps Malade mentions "les ex-pères du divorce" (the former fathers of divorce). That's an excellent and really unique way of discussing the effects of divorce on all members of a family. BUT, there's a whole extra layer of meaning, because that same phrase could also be "les experts du divorce" (which is pronounced exactly the same and means "experts on divorce" ie people who've been divorced multiple times). Which one is it "really?" Here's the thing... we'll never know. If you Google the lyrics, you'll be able to find many different versions of this poem online. None of them are officially sanctioned. Because Grand Corps Malade believes that his poetry should be heard, which allows all those layers of meaning to exist at once.

This kind of thing is much easier to do in French than English, simply because of the way the language works. There are a lot more words which end with the same sounds than there are in English, in which there are more exceptions than rules. Admittedly, I don't have the widest knowledge of poetry, but I've been unable to find anything that plays with sound as explicitly as "Pères et Mères" does. Not Dadaist sound poetry, which focuses on sound, but lacks the meaning and wordplay of Grand Corps Malade. Not anything else. The closest thing I saw was "Lost Voices", which relies on the voices saying the words as much as the words themselves to make meaning.

But if it hasn't been done, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it (if it has been done and I just don't know about it, please let me know)!

So, here's your assignment: write out a list (or several) of words which rhyme. See if any patterns emerge. Then write a poem (or a few lines) in which you try to make puns and layer meaning through sound. This is a pretty difficult one, so please share if you succeed!

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.