BODY AND LANGUAGE

“The reason poets like to unite sound and sense speaks not merely for the brain but for the whole human being, body and mind” (Nims 179). Nims claims that when the sound complements the sense, “the meaning of a poem becomes physicalized” resisting “the authoritarianism of the intellect,” which races to assert a meaning on sound regardless of its nature. “This figure of speech, far from being the exclusive property of academics, is really best understood by people who live physically, in their bodies” (Nims 175). “Appropriate sound invites the body to participate in the being of a poem, just as the poet’s body participated in its creation” (Nims 179). The poem is a physical body itself and is energized by the speaker. In a literal way, the breath of the poet, the speaker, and the listener all enable the poem to manifest in space. And paying attention to the “quality of individual sounds,” one can “participate more completely, or physically, in the experience of the poem” (Nims 159). In this way, the sounds can simulate the desired effect. Even when we read silently, the speech mechanisms and “areas of the throat pick up electrical currents,” showing that the muscles are stimulated. The body will sympathize with what the mind experiences. We know that colors can affect us physically. For instance, “pure red can raise blood pressure and accelerate heartbeat, whereas fixing the eyes on pure blue can have a tranquilizing effect,” so the effects of sound may be no less visceral (153 Nims).

In his book Lyric Poetry: the pain and the pleasure of words, Mutlu Blasing explains that, sound and “language is emotionally charged because it has to be acquired” (13). The ear is the first organ to develop in utero and the last faculty to fade as we die (Paul 14). Even anesthesia or a coma does not block auditory input (Gaynor 87). In the 1960s, researchers found that the ear is fully evolved at 4 ½ months old and hearing may occur much earlier. The fetus is able to hear a wide range of low-frequency sounds (Gaynor 91).

Although their specific characteristics vary, every culture socializes its infants with language by teaching them “to hear and communicate emotion and thus intentionaliz[ing] acoustic and muscular phenomena.” Verbal mimicry of natural sounds are thought to “account for the origin of language.” We see this when comic book illustrations convey action, and at some point in our lives we have called an object by its corresponding sound (like cricket, slush, or the boom of fireworks) .The chosen combination of consonants and vowels reveals an object’s intrinsic quality. “Beyond simple onomatopoeia,” there have been named “two subtly appropriate classes of words: those in which movement of lips, tongue, and cheek, together with suggestive sound, simulate the action described and those in which sounds are not imitative, but suggestive musical equivalents” (Nims 178). “But learning language is both an emotional training and a physiological disciplining of the organic body,” in which we control “oral muscular activity” in order to produce articulate sounds in a linguistic code or “recognizable phonemes.” As we develop, we must isolate different “noises produced in the larynx” as a response to “auditory and multimedia reception” then we interpret these blocks of code into “symbolic value.” Our use of linguistic code threads the gross body to “symbolic language. The oral zone is a sexually charged zone because it functions as a tool of survival and sustenance. Infants are “seduced into discipline” by becoming an individual who is socialized into a “crux of pain and pleasure.”

Poetry formally returns to that crux, to the emotionally charged history of the disciplining and seduction into language; it affirms the seductions of laws and the pleasures of discipline, always keeping in view the alien code and the pain of language.

And the lyric is grounded not on the body but on its history, which is what we hear in the materiality of lyric language. Poetic language reveals that machinery and the constitutive alienation of the “human,” as bodily produced events are “meta-phore” or translated into signifying units and come to circulate as social currency (Blasing 13).


We express lyrically in order to exchange or convey a physical experience of life—a way for speaking people to resonate with a shared experience.