Write a Sound Poem

What’s a Sound Poem?
For our purposes, a sound poem is one that takes its inspiration from sounds heard in your local environment and community. It could be the seagull’s screech at South Beach or the rumble of traffic under the Verrazano Bridge. It could be the cicadas in your backyard or the  laughter of your children. Staten Island is alive with sound, from the helicopters that buzz overhead during rush hour, to the Staten Island Rapid Transit trains that run the rails from urban St. George to relatively rural Tottenville. Hear the snap of the American flag outside of Perkins Restaurant on Hylan Boulevard. Listen for the bells on the ice cream truck in your neighborhood. These audio events may prompt a memory, bring up an emotion, or alert you to environmental changes. The fog horns in Upper New York Bay, the foundation-shaking dredger in the Kill Van Kull, and the Staten Island Ferry’s baritone salute may remind you that you live on an island. What poem will these and other local sounds prompt you to write?

Three Poetic Forms
Sometimes it helps to use a particular poetic form or devise to get the creative juices flowing. Here are three forms that you may find useful—and fun:

Haiku and Senryu 

Acrostic 

Lipogram 

Below, Staten Islander Bill Murphy’s rendering of Arlington Yard, an abandoned rail yard owned by the Staten Island Railway, and the site of illegally-dumped hospital waste and asbestos. The yard is a testament to Staten Island’s ever-changing landscape and soundscape.

 

HAIKU AND SENRYU   
Traditional Japanese 3-line haiku has 17 syllables (5-7-5) and takes nature as its subject. Contemporary haiku takes a more open form—often having fewer than 17 syllables—and may be written on one, two, three or even four lines. A haiku that only references human nature and artifacts is called senryu. A senryu has no “season word.” However, a contemporary piece that addresses both nature and humans is considered haiku: “Written in the present tense, a haiku focuses on nature, frequently includes or suggests a season word (kigo), and relates a moment of discovery/surprise (the "aha!" moment) with each line offering a distinct image. Also, within the haiku, a pivotal point (a pause) shifts to another image, thereby dividing the poem into two parts. The pivot occurs at the end of the first or second line.” —Elizabeth St. Jacques 

Here is an example of contemporary haiku that references nature, has a season word, and includes human experience. By Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa: 

spring rain—

in the wife’s sleeve

coins jingle   

And here is an example of senryu by American poet Barry George: 

        his quiet funeral—

a man who did

most of the talking 

Some American poets used punctuation and capital letters, which is not traditional. Richard Wright, in This Other World 5, wrote: 

A summer barnyard:

Swishing tails of twenty cows

Twitching at the flies.  

Here is an example of haiku by Staten Islander Robin Locke Monda, on the sounds of the dredger in the Kill Van Kull, off of Staten Island:  

Locomotive chuffing

from the Kill van Kull digs 

deep. Listen: 

Now It’s your turn!
Try writing in the traditional haiku form, but take the sounds generated by human beings and/ or nature as your topic. Then try writing in a more liberal haiku form, taking a sound from nature as your topic, and using a season word. Finally, try a senryu, focusing entirely on human-made sounds and experience. Did writing about a Staten Island sound in the haiku form heighten your awareness of your audio environment?

Christine Sun’s watercolor of the dredger, Illinois.

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ACROSTIC  
Classic Acrostic
Have you ever memorized a list by creating an easy-to-remember word or phrase out of the first letters of each item on the list?  Acrostic poems work similarly and are often used as mnemonic devices. They can also “hide”—in plain sight—a word or message made from the first letter, word or syllable of each line in a poetic text. Although acrostics are considered a form of “constrained writing,” they are actually quite fun and liberating to write! 

Here is an acrostic written by Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking Glass (1871). Note that the first first letters of each line, read vertically, spell out the name of Alice Pleasance Liddell, the young lady who inspired Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:

London
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls
          —William Blake

Here is a simple acrostic poem about a Staten Island audio experience. The poem’s title is “Cicadas,” so each letter in that title begins a line in the poem:

Cicadas
Cicadas wail away  
In the field on Academy Place, 
Chirping with buckled timbals an
Amorous song before
Death drops them, rattled,
Among the dry weeds near   
Seeded nymphs.
          —Robin Locke Monda

Above, a photo by former Staten Islander Michael Falco of the ferry, American Legion. We see Manhattan and New York Harbor from the lower deck. The ferry is a rich source of sonic experience.

Now it’s your turn!
Now that you’ve read some examples and understand the basic concept, you're ready to start an acrostic poem about a Staten Island sound experience. A few tips to help you get started: 

1. Choose the title, which is also your subject. It could be a phrase, such as “Birds Chirping”, or a single word like, “Ferry.”

2. Brainstorm to come up with words or phrases that represent the sound experience you want to write about.

3. Write the title vertically along the left side of your paper or online document.

4. Each line of your sound poem will now begin with a letter that corresponds to the letters in your title.

5. Make sure every line relates to the line before, but more importantly that it relates back to the audio subject and your title.

Once you get the hang of this basic acrostic poem, try some of the more challenging forms: a double acrostic, a double acrostic with the ending letter spelling out the same phrase or word—but backward—and experiment with creating longer and more challenging title lines. 

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LIPOGRAM  
The Lipogram is a form of wordplay that has been practiced at least since the 1930s. One famous lipogramic challenge is to write without the letter “e”, since the “e” is the most commonly used letter in the English language (witness this sentence!). Another form of lipogramic restriction is writing only with one syllable words. The point: to play with language and prime the creative pump through formal constraints.

So let’s write a lipgramic poem about a Staten Island sound. Choose your title based on the audio experience you want to write about. Example: you may want to write about the traffic noise in New Springville. Try calling your poem “New Springville Traffic Noise.” The title will determine the letters you can write with. In this case we are limited to a, c, e, f, g, i, l, n, o, p, r, s, t, v and w. All other letters in the alphabet are excluded. This is a challenging way to write, but it’s rewarding when you achieve results. An example, with our hypothetical title/subject:

New Springville Traffic Noise
Listen to traffic—lanes of
cars passing vans at angles.
Tires roll. Cans, glass, iron
springs line fragrant swaths
of grass and leaves, strewn
with paper, silent as twigs.

—Robin Locke Monda

Above, a photo by former Staten Islander Michael Falco of a garbage barge being cleaned at the former Fresh Kills Land Fill (now the Freshkills Park Project). What does the scrubbing of a barge sound like? Are the seagulls circling overhead screeching?

Now it’s your turn
Write a lipogram about a Staten Island sound. Start by choosing your subject/title. Make sure it has at least a couple of vowels in it. Then write down as many words as you can think of, using the letters from your subject/title. The words you can make will suggest a way of writing the poem. You may have to revise your title a few times to get a mix of letters that is not too restrictive— unless you want to write lipogramic haiku!

Staten Island poets and local sound
Of course you can write poems about Staten Island sounds without any of these poetic devices. If you are confident in your writing, plunge right in! Staten Island has a rich community of poets. Download this pdf to read some of their work. In some of the poems, you may think sounds play a minor role. But read closely and you will see how the sounds described establish a psychic or emotional state, create an authentic sense of place, or capture a particular moment in time. Included are works by Victoria Hallerman, Robert Monda, Marguerite Rivas, Lisa Rhoades, Vincent T. Vok, Robin Locke Monda, Cate Marvin, Wil Wynn, Jessica R. Krantz, Caroline Kandler, and others.

Below, Staten Island’s September 11th Memorial, Postcards, photographed by Staten Islander Willie Chu. Even though the site is next to a baseball stadium and the St. George Ferry Terminal, it anchors a quiet and meditative space just a stone’s throw from the water’s edge.

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