An Ear for Poetry

The question occurred to me early in my literary studies: how could I, Rachel, have any sort of ear for poetry? I was deaf. Stumbling through the syllabic feet of poetic meter felt like tripping and falling down the stairs. I loved the lyrical artistry of poets such as John Donne, William Wordsworth, and Elizabeth Bishop. But would I ever find poetry fully accessible?

Listen for it: with those words, a good half-dozen high school English teachers and, later, college professors explained how I should approach meter. They described stressed and unstressed syllables and metrical patterns based on auditory quality. “Do you hear that? Do you hear the rhythm of the line?” I did not. How could I?

Sometimes someone would help me clap out a poem’s scansion with my hands, thereby channeling the flow of language to my body. Nonetheless, the primary emphasis in our conversations always fell on sound, something I could teach myself to discuss, in the same way one discusses abstract or elusive concepts, such as atomic orbitals, but never completely grasp. I compared this focus in English-language poetry with my experience in Latin class studying Virgil, where I learned to scan poems by memorizing the predominant Latin rules for long or short vowels rather than listening for where the stress in a word fell. There, logic (and not only my “ear,” or lack thereof) prevailed, and I soon felt as though I burrowed deep into Virgil’s metrical patterns with aplomb.

In contrast, I approached writing poems for college creative writing classes with paralyzing uncertainty. Assignments that required a particular meter or rhyme scheme felt impossible. Iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter, trochees and spondees: I could count, I could feel, but I feared that I was shut out of the poems—all because of this emphasis on their intangible sound. Before too long, I turned to writing prose instead, in which I felt as though my words found the space to twirl and expand.

I still remained drawn to some poets, such as Emily Dickinson, who seemed explicitly to invite readers who could seek out “internal difference— / Where the Meanings are.” In April 1862, Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “You ask of my companions, Hills, sir, and the Sundown. . . . They are better than Beings because they know—but do not tell.” For Dickinson, the fact that these “companions” do not speak audibly points to a different realm of sensory significance, at once more spontaneous and more ineffable than the organized patterns of speech and music.

Clearly, poetry surpasses the auditory in many other ways, from its visual spaces on the page to the aesthetic qualities of a brilliant image and the visceral thrust of language striking readers at the core. But I have always thought that I put poetry aside too early because of my nagging suspicion that its auditory qualities were not made for me. Without a good “ear” for poetry, how was I supposed to master a poem?

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We’ve come together—a poet and a critic—to discuss this because the issue should not pertain just to deaf people. It is an issue that should be of vital importance to the larger poetry community. Making metaphors is what poets do, so it’s reasonable that we would have many metaphors for being able to read and write poetry. Voice, music, ear—these metaphors are part of the core vocabulary of discussing poetic ability. But poets, for all their sensitivity, sometimes forget that these metaphors have implications beyond their immediate usage. And the metaphor of the ear is, despite its widespread currency, particularly problematic on closer examination.

K. Silem Mohammad, writing for the Poetry Foundation, defines “the poet’s ear”: “When we say that a poet ‘has a good ear,’ we usually mean that that poet has gone past the stage of mere listening, and has passed the transmission (which the poet has supposedly ‘heard’ in order to create the poem) on to the reader via writing, thus becoming the sender rather than the receiver.” (The ear itself is, of course, also a key metaphorical figure in many poems throughout Western literature—from Claudius pouring poison into the ear of Hamlet’s father to Carolyn Forché’s Colonel scattering severed ears on his palace floor—but the focus here is on the ear as a metaphor for discussing poems, not when they appear within them.) This emphasis on “having a good ear” may, in fact, be tied to the historical roots of poetry as an oral tradition. Early lyrics were composed for accompaniment by a lyre or other instruments, and Homeric bards recited epic poems aloud. Later, troubadours sang their courtly verses.

To new students of poetry, however, the ear and related aural expressions, such as “listen for it,” are today primarily bywords for ability. The metaphor of the ear is tied to this unintended emphasis on particular kinds of ability and has the unintended consequence of creating a sphere of inaccessibility in the way poetry is read and discussed.

Some critics may disagree with this interpretation of the metaphor of a poet’s ear. Mohammad, for example, writes in his post: “The expression clearly suggests that the significant talent on the poet’s part is one of being able to ‘hear’ what will sound most effective even before it has been physically spoken. … The concept thus potentially allows both poet and reader to bypass any literal act of listening: both may establish themselves as having good ears without necessarily ever hearing any actual sounds.” (Writers from John Ciardi to Li-Young Lee to Rae Armantrout have argued that poems can be more about silences than sounds.) But this overlooks an important first step: assumptions about how readers “establish themselves as having good ears” are limited to readers who already feel confident that they have attained mastery of the various auditory metrics of “significant talent” in poetry.

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The question of how anyone begins to attain this mastery is complex. For one, is this process more openly available to poets who have exceptional auditory ability, to the exclusion of those who do not? Does having a good ear, in fact, rely on an innate ability to hear?

Many ways exist to answer these questions, but we want to focus on one: the little-discussed world of poetry produced by deaf writers. Deaf poets have been producing original written work for generations, even if the standard discourse that surrounds conceptions of poetic ability often frames them as a curiosity remarkable only for their deafness and not for their literary merit. As deaf and blind poet and critic John Lee Clark wrote in 2005 in Poetry magazine (which recently included him in an excellent feature on disability and poetry): “The deaf poet is no oxymoron. But one would think so, given the popular understanding that poetry has sound and voice at its heart.” Some of Clark’s work displaces this conventional focus on sound and, instead, puts the sign language of the Deaf community at the core of poetry. In “Long Goodbyes,” Clark beseeches readers to embrace the communication and cultural conventions that make the Deaf community feel so tight-knit: “Sign, do sign / Better go home we and our hands / will make time go suddenly slow.” The self-awareness and rich sensory detail that we find in poets such as Clark belie the popular conceptions of deafness that sometimes persist in mainstream culture, such as linguistic constructions that link deafness to stupidity or ineptitude (think of the phrases deaf and dumb, turning deaf ears to). This audism, or the assumed superiority of auditory ability, can lead to the unspoken conclusion that any poet who cannot hear must, therefore, lack some fundamental measure of poetic talent.

Partially in response to this, but mostly because of the rich visual nature of American Sign Language and other global sign languages, there is a separate tradition within Deaf culture of producing signed poetry whose words never reach the written page, much less any sort of auditory space. ASL poets such as Clayton Valli and Bernard Bragg (who is also known as one of the fathers of Deaf theater) create their work in the air—one thinks of Samuel Coleridge’s line “I would build that dome in air”—in the suspended space between poet and audience. Their works can be difficult to find online, but a few videos exist. In “Dandelion,” Valli embodies the scene of dandelions entrenching themselves in a field, proliferating their seeds despite—or perhaps because of—outside efforts to stamp them out. Bragg, who is also known for his style as a storyteller, creates an evocative scene of nature in his depiction of the evening in “Flowers and Moonlight on the Spring Water.” The moonlight gracefully leaps down from the sky to sail on the water, and the stars glitter on the current with a particular delicacy that would be an entirely different challenge to capture with written words alone.

Unlike ASL translations of written English poems, and unlike the recent popular trend of songsigning popular song lyrics (which has drawn some criticism within the Deaf community for being an example of cultural appropriation, especially when produced by hearing performance artists), these works of ASL poetry are entirely original. They are not linked to any sort of written tradition, and clearly they rely on a unique conception of visual space as the primary grounds of their art. And they are poetry. The work that those deaf poets have already produced, both in standard written formats and in ASL poetry, challenges the idea that it is necessary for a good poet to have a “good ear”—pushing it, even, to absurdity.

Becoming more inclusive in our metaphors and our vocabulary for talking about poetry does not mean stripping away the richness and texture of our critical vocabulary. Rather, it points to the possibilities of expanding it. Poets of many schools and backgrounds have created a rich tradition of visual poetry—whether Apollinaire's Calligrammes, Fluxus poetry, the radiating spokes of Mary Szybist’s How (Not) to Talk of God,” or Jenny Holzer’s pathbreaking artworks—and deaf poets who produce work in ASL extend this tradition further by dispensing with the page entirely. Deaf poets who write for the page, meanwhile, create art that reflects the deep spatial and visual potential of poetry; their poems do not ever need to enter the realm of the auditory to introduce readers to a poet’s full vision.

Dating back to James Nack in the Romantic period, deaf poets have offered their own versions of what it means to create the rhythm of poetry. In his 1827 poem, aptly titled “The Music of Beauty,” Nack concludes, “I pity those who think they pity me.” The early 20th-century deaf writer J. Schuyler Long describes in his poem “I Wish That I Could Tell” the desire to tell hearing people “Of the music that I see / In the buds of spring unfolding” and “Of the music in the hand / When in Songs it moves in Rhythm.” Poets such as these challenge everyone to shake off our unthinking habits of speech and inherited patterns of thought to consider a wider range of possibilities for communication—“the music in the hand,” the music we can see. Among these possibilities, poetry is just the first step.