Is the function of the poet here mere sound?

Wallace Stevens, in "Academic Discourse at Havana" asks this question. He appears to believe that the sounds of words can give us an idea of meanings derived from sounds. Whether this is true of "Daily Threads" I'm not at all sure.

Anyway, "Daily Threads is above all a poem of sounds. There is an interweaving of vowel assonance, alliteration, and rhyme. It's also the first poem I've seen with twenty
consecutive stressed syllables. Here they are:

...-touched, rouged, hushed
Scat tracks, crosswalk, bebop
haircut; moonshine, daylight,
pills not popped: no threats

Look at the first stanza.

Backstreet barricade, arcane
balustrade, hidden kingdom of wing and prayer,
details too fine to miss or mess with,
skinny escape from a netherhood
of parapets and puddle soaked oaks.

Backstreet and barricade alliterate the b's, and the long a in barricade is repeated in the a of arcane. In the next line, balustrade rhymes with barricade and the long a is again repeated. The ing in kingdom is echoed in wing. Miss and mess provide a double alliteration, as with skinny and escape. Parapets contains internal alliteration and the p's are further alliterated in puddle. Finally (I think) soaked and oaks repeat oak and also s. It's easy to find the same interweaving throughout: sounds related both within a line or between consecutive lines.

I've examined "Daily Threads" trying to find every instance of these correspondences. They are present in every line, but there in two lines they are less frequent:

details too fine to miss or mess with
haircut; moonshine, daylight

Perhaps we can infer that there is some reason for these lines other than sound. The implication that this weaving of threads is an activity of value in itself, not requiring any meaning. Or perhaps it will reveal something more than sound. After all, other than language poets, most of us want some kind of meaning to come out in the end. The idea that sound and meaning are related goes back to Plato's Cratylus. But since Wyn Cooper seems to be a swinger, I won't burden him.

Speaking of sound Bottomfish, Wyn Cooper and Robert Pinsky sound like identical sound twins, if you listen to the reading, seriously.

And, by the way…who chooses these?

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I like the name of Cooper’s book, due out next year: Chaos is the new calm. I read this article this morning; I like the idea of “taking advantage of the vagaries of the natural world”.

Plato's Cratylus is a new one, on me; I’ll have to visit with it later.

Please don't recommend to me things that I can choose on my own. I don't like being manipulated.

The implication that this weaving of threads is an activity of value in itself, not requiring any meaning. Or perhaps it will reveal something more than sound. After all, other than language poets, most of us want some kind of meaning to come out in the end.

Hi Bottomfish,

I agree that the weaving of threads is an activity of value in itself -- for each of us. I'm guessing that Cooper didn't bother to come up with his own personal meaning because his point is that each of us needs to do our own weaving of our own experiences. Plus, whatever meaning we might come up with today might be entirely different tomorrow when we have a new experience. So we just need to keep going with our weaving of experiences / threads.

In that respect, perhaps this poem is a throwback to the modernist poets who felt that what's important in a poem is not what the author says, but what the reader thinks as a result of the poem.

Or -- "the medium is the message " -- the weaving together of words (that represent experiences) that this poem illustrates is the poet's "message."

Hi, BF, I feel absolute delight at what the poet has done here with sound. It's like watching a guy play the spoons -- his own body and an ordinary household object combine to create a magical concert.

I'm like, wow, how on earth does he do that? So I go home and get a couple of spoons out of the silverware drawer and try it myself and realize it's even harder and more magical than I first imagined.

I think part of the appeal of rap music is based upon those same kinds of sound, how fast the words flow, how they bounce off each other, how they sometimes mesh and sometimes clash.

It may be unfair to use the word "mere" with the word "sound" in this case.

Sure, you can enjoy the sounds. I do too. That's why I printed out the poem, double-spaced, and marked all the alliterations and so on. If you're happy with that, fine.

You seem to imply there should be more :-)

Words have meanings. Here is something where meanings are subdued but not extinguished:

This thoroughness whose traditions have become so reflective,
your distinction is merely a quill at the bottom of the sea
tracing forever the fabulous alarms of the mute
so that in the limpid tosses of your violet dinginess
a pus appears and lingers like a groan from the collar
of a reproachful tree whose needles are tired of howling.
One distinguishes merely the newspapers of a sediment,
since going underground is like discovering something in
your navel that has an odor and is about to fly away.
I must bitterly reassure the resurgence of your complaints
for you, like all heretics, penetrate my glacial immodesty,
and I am like a nun trembling before the microphone
at a movie premiere while a tidal wave has seized the theatre
and borne it to Siam, decorated it and wrecked its projector.