Welcome to Sound Lab Mouthfeel #1. I’ve been toying around with the idea of offering something a little different here. I want to work out a different muscle and this is the official launch of that routine. This won’t be a full-on breakdown of a poem. This is more about letting yourself play with sound on your ear and your lips. Like a lamaze class for the birth of a poem. I don’t love that analogy now that I’ve typed it out but I’m letting it rock. This is me inviting you to sit with how sounds shape feelings and textures inside a poem.
Today’s focus is going to be the long O and U, along with OO. The slow vowels. The sustain pedal vowels. I could have honestly separated them, because there is some nuance. O is a slow roll, OO is a hollow drag, and U is a lighter glide outward. I’ll definitely eventually go into each one on their own, but for now I’ll focus on the overlap. They stretch the mouth, pull the lips into a circle, and drag the syllable out longer than it “needs” to be. That physical stretch translates directly into how we experience a line: slowed, elongated, suspended. The lines begin to bend time and play with the delivery in a way that you can start to feel.
I’ll give you an example. Say “bit, bet, bat” out loud. Notice how they are quick, staccato sounds that rattle off of each other. If you say them fast enough, they almost vanish behind all the “b” sounds. Now say “boat, boot.” You can’t hurry them the same way. They stall you. Even if you try to rapid fire repeat them, it only seems to emphasize the vowel sounds and leave the consonant as an afterthought. The use of these vowels helps to shift the line to an entirely new tempo.
We can look back at some of the poems I’ve broken down to see the way these sounds work in real time.
Marie Howe, Before:
“The boulder once dust, will be dust again …”
The word boulder could honestly do the whole job itself here. It’s so damn heavy because of the drag of the vowel. But dust comes along to help it out and stretch it out further. Its past (dust), present (boulder), and future (dust) are all elongated to create a heft that we feel in the reading. This is an immovable object.
Louise Glück, Night Thoughts:
“Long ago I was born.”
Those long Os drag you back in time to the moment of her birth. Along the way they sort of add an aching stretch to the memory. Imagine if the line said “Years back I was born.” The meaning is essentially the same and the syntax doesn’t fall apart, but the short vowels collapse the spell. The ache comes from the O sounds.
William Stafford, Mr. Or Mrs. Nobody:
“Suppose that a person who knows you happens / to see you going by …”
A whole chain of drag in this one with suppose, knows, you, to, going. That cluster makes the chance encounter feel suspended in time. It actually puts you into that moment, when you’re walking along a path lost in your thoughts and can’t necessarily differentiate one moment on the walk from another, when suddenly, you see someone familiar and the moment drags out. Time is suddenly given weight because this moment is no longer indistinguishable from the ones that came before it.
Carl Phillips, Sunlight in Fog:
“Maybe what a river loves most / about the banks that hold it—that appear to hold it”
The long O in most and hold slows the current of the line, creating a sense of want in the reader as they float along the words. What does the river love most? What does anyone or anything love most? What a dynamic idea to try to tie down in definite qualification. The repetition of hold doubles the suspension, changing the meaning of the word in real time. The word itself implies containment but the sound makes containment feel tenuous, stretched thin, like the river itself leaning against its banks.
Joseph Hutchison, A Natural History:
“I’ve passed / eons as a mouth, muscular / flower of cold hunger.”
This one holds the whole system of sounds that we’re looking at today in one flow. The O in eons stretches time itself, forcing the mouth to linger on the vastness it names. The long U in muscular glides outward, towards the cold. Together they create a sort of menace that, taken in isolation, is a horrific image. On some level, we are left with this image of a grotesque, insatiable mouth. It’s basically everything that is unsettling about Little Shop of Horrors.
These sounds have the power to employ time dilation and actually change the way we feel about the line. It’s subtle, obviously, the way that a few minutes on a line can feel like eternity but a few minutes with a lover can feel like a blip. These built-in dilations actively shift the poetic metronome, creating tension at the points where pace switches. You can actually feel it on your lips and in your lungs. When a poem needs solemnity, or memory, or a kind of ache, it reaches for those sounds.
Exercises for the lab:
Read a line of poetry you love and circle all long Os, long Us, and OOs. Say it once silently, then once aloud. Notice how the aloud version slows you down.
Try rewriting a line with short vowels swapped in and watch how the spell breaks. (Example: Glück’s “Long ago I was born” vs. “Years back I was born.”)
Record yourself reading something with long Os, Us, and OOs. Play it back. Notice the way your own voice bends time.
Notice where your breath stalls. Chances are there’s a long vowel holding the line open for you. That’s the poem stretching time on purpose.
Love this, Mike!! Looking forward to more of these!
I was practicing for a reading on Sunday and realized that one of my favorite poems to read has those long sounds. It was fun to pay attention to it as I read.