Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field - Rishma Dunlop, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Priscila Uppal 2016
“I’m stone in love with you”: stylistics in the creative writing classroom
Writing creative writing pedagogy
LOUIS CABRI
Linguistics has become increasingly important to me in teaching literature courses. What I’ve learned is that some of my creative writing students who also enrolled in linguistics-leaning literature courses of mine have found transferable from those courses not literary history or interpretation, ironically, but some of the linguistics. One creative writing student began to experiment with sentence construction after becoming aware that the transitivity model could describe the way language represents experiential processes: they fell into six basic categories. So my student asked, “Why are there six kinds and not seven? Can there be a seventh? What would an experiential process look like that defies the six basic types, and what would such a process require of language?” These would seem to be speculative questions far removed from the creative writing page, but they speak to how linguistics can feed the imagination concerning not just what is language but what is literature.
Some of my creative writing students appear to be interested in what linguistics in the broadest sense has to offer them because linguistics gives them a way of speaking, of perceiving, and of thinking about the language that is all around them — both inside and outside them. Linguistics offers a way to objectify language, including literary language in written form. I agree that linguistics potentially gives a creative writing student a conceptual toolbox for understanding and for articulating in minute detail why it is they respond the way they do to what it is they read and what it is they write.
It’s not that I plan to have my students exclusively reading linguistics texts in a creative writing class; nor do I wish upon them listening to me lecture about grammatical structures, semantic features, or allophones. Linguistics informs, nonetheless, the way I talk about student writing and the coursepack readings I choose. And when I am successful in my approach, then the disciplinary trappings of linguistics, its jargon, methods, theory, and history, remain hidden in plain sight. I would want it so, at the undergraduate level: what’s most important is the student writing.
Concepts of linguistics also appear to be of interest to some students because they give students a way to play around with making the significant distinction between the language in general everyday use and the language that is presented as having a specific literary or aesthetic dimension. Linguistics helps them differentiate and identify stylistic — in other words, aesthetic — effects in language.
What is great about a language focus in a creative writing classroom is that language is something students already have a sophisticated knowledge about, even though that knowledge is largely unconscious (as it is inside us all) — intuitable, yes, but always presupposed by everything they say and hear. Turning to linguistics in the creative writing classroom is also due in my case to some basic questions that confront me at the start of the teaching year: How do I introduce and present formally challenging poetry within an undergraduate creative writing class? How do I present formally innovative poetry to students who have not yet accumulated enough experiences as readers of literary and cultural norms and conventions, and of literary history and aesthetics, to grasp what might otherwise strike them — and with mixed emotions perhaps of insecurity and indifference — as difficult?
From my perspective, to answer these questions about difficulty that teachers experience regarding almost any subject, to answer with a lecture, in a creative writing class, pointing out literary and cultural norms and conventions operating in a given poem, and the literary history and aesthetics — “placing the work in context” — now has little appeal to me. (Admittedly, I’ve subjected my students to monologues of this sort in the past.) Instead of reaching down through literature with a capital L for the sources that will help to deliver this kind of lecture, what about reaching across to another discipline entirely? This reaching across could be toward the visual arts, or music, or even toward a scientific discipline; the step I’ve chosen is toward linguistics.
There is an interdisciplinary study located at the intersection of linguistics and literature, called stylistics, which has been around for more than half a century. Stylistics is, to cite one textbook, a “method of textual interpretation in which primacy of place is assigned to language” (Simpson 2). And what I find compelling about some of its theory and application is how stylistics argues that one can present formally challenging poetry by drawing from the students’ own already-developed sense of norms — not their weak sense of literary norms, but their strong — even rigid — sense of the norms of everyday language use. As when a student exclaims, on first reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: “You can’t write ’Roast potatoes for,’ because that’s just stupid — it’s an incomplete sentence.” My fantasy rejoinder will be, “Student A, you are remarkable! You have a strong and highly developed — even rigid, as in righteous — sense of the norms of everyday language use! Bravo for recognizing them! Now let me ask you something. What if poets are meant to draw a reader’s attention precisely to the presence of those norms, even if in order to do so they must contravene them, as Gertrude Stein has so deliciously done herself?”
The idea here is to help students consciously articulate what strikes them as stupefyingly obvious, articulate what it is that students, teachers, and writers, as language-users, already intuit about so-called acceptable language use. The idea of encouraging students to consciously recognize their implicitly agreed-on conventions of acceptable language use turns out to be a key to unlocking — to perceiving — the nature of literary language.
That is, stylistics often works from the premise that literary language is literary because of how it deviates (or detours away) from acceptable language use. Thus a stylistics analysis will contrast a present literary deviation to a pre-existing language norm. For example, in a literature course, I’ve asked students to read the opening two stanzas of “Berkeley St Bridge” by John Wieners:
Petrified the world
wherein we walk.
Frozen the fields.
I then asked students to rewrite these two sentence-like word sequences using the most normative syntax and grammar they could conceive of. Many students came up with something like
The world is petrified where we walk. The fields are frozen.
Then, finally, I ask them to demonstrate the literary effects caused by the poet’s words deviating the way they do from these grammatical norms. The work of a creative writing classroom, then, might also lie in such a pedagogical direction, in collectively making manifest these language norms at play in literary texts (norms that underlie hasty judgments upon these literary texts). Even literary norms were once perceived as deviations from language norms. But because they’re no longer perceived as deviations but as standard literary customs, they’ve become clichés. After all, “Petrified the world / wherein we walk” is arch, haute-poetic — with a capital P !
I repeat: A key to unlocking — to perceiving — the nature of literary language is recognizing the implicitly agreed-on conventions of acceptable language use that the literary language deliberately contravenes. And I mean perceiving “the nature of literary language” in the broadest sense. So I’ll switch up the register through which to perceive a play of norm and deviation, from the proto-camp lyrical register of Wieners’s gay angst to the manufactured consent of the advertisement slogan: “So good it’s riDQulous.”
Dairy Queen’s 2011 slogan is a good example, at the micro level where sound and spelling interact, of how deviation can make norm perceptible, and how norm, likewise, can make deviation perceptible. For how does one spell “ridiculous,” anyway? How does one usually pronounce it? What’s ingenious about this particular slogan is that it does more than slow down perception enough to allow one to recall and then relish identity and difference between orthographic deviation and norm. In addition, the corporate slogan demands that viewers change the way they utter the word, because the consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel sequence -dicu- in the word ridiculous is not pronounced the same way as the letter-sequence -dq- in riDQulous: it’s something like /dǝkI/ versus /dikju/. (That is, the slogan impels us to pronounce the names of the two letters that constitute the brand name: d and q.) Substituting the deviation in pronunciation dq for the norm -dicu- constitutes one of the slogan’s literary effects. To pronounce ridiculous as “ridqulous” is not phonotactically unacceptable. Moreover, the altered pronunciation creates the allure of a “foreign accent” at play, even retroactively leading one to consider rolling the initial r (as in, say, Russian), because the word-form itself (in its totality) is affected by pronouncing /dǝkI/ as /dikju/.
Dairy Queen advertisers evidently know their concrete poetry! At this point in a classroom discussion I might say something like: Formally innovative poetry always anticipates larger mass-cultural trends. The problem I have with making such statements these days, as truthful as they may be (and I am about to give one further proof of this), is that such authoritative statements alone don’t give the students the tools to analyze language and incorporate its play into their own writing. So, in my creative writing classes, I sidestep the literary history lesson about Mallarmé, futurism, advertising, and fashion, and go straight to a comparison of norms and deviations between the DQ slogan and what bpNichol was doing decades ago — for instance, in this complete poem:
em ty
Nichol’s poem indicates how the sound of the letter p is emptied out, or is absented from the norm of pronunciation that readers intuit and use when uttering the word empty. The absence of the p-sound in the sound-sequence “emty” is cleverly disguised from ordinary perception because readers need to bring lips together to articulate the next sound in the word’s sequence — the t-sound. Nichol is not demanding that his readers change the way they pronounce empty. He’s in fact pointing out how we pronounce it normally. That’s the literary effect: contravening one norm (spelling) while confirming another (pronunciation). Incidentally, if Dairy Queen had asked Nichol to come up with a name for a line of plastic refillable water bottles (for cyclists, say), perhaps Nichol would have called it “MT” — which of course would be TM.
Another variation at this micro-level of sound-and-letter play is the concrete poetry classic by Aram Saroyan
Lighght
which poses the opposite end of the spectrum of Nichol’s point, in that Saroyan’s poem highlights exactly those letters whose visual presence is overt, and yet do not exist orally.
What the DQ slogan and Nichol’s and Saroyan’s poems have in common is that each gently tests the limits of word-form structure and of word formation rules in English. From a linguistics viewpoint, underlying such verbal inventions as these is a fundamental, yet vexing, and terrifyingly simple question: What is a word? Our intuition-based norms about language tell us that of course we know the answer — at least we could be reactive and say we’d recognize a word when we see one. But in fact a word is difficult to describe, let alone define or even formulate as principle. Most poets don’t test word-form norms. And for Robert Grenier, John Keats is an exemplary poet in this regard. Notice that, in order to describe what Keats does do so well within the universe of the well-made word, Grenier resorts to the vocabulary of linguistics, defining syllable and word as a linguist would:
think of Keats as really ’milking’ words of all possible letter/phonemic qualities without really challenging notion of English word/morpheme as basic unit of ’meaning’ — hence ’best effects’ all-stress monosyllabic —“No, no, go not to Leth(e)” — “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?” — because mind in work really does want to think phonemically, one sounds so ’dense & rich,’ tongued — slows down articulation so teeth, lips, whole vocal apparatus drawn in to pronouncing letters, reading it aloud — counting ’syllables’ (convenient grouping of phonemes/smallest unit one normally hears) thus more than old poetic habit, focuses attention toward primary semantic unit … ’meaning’ identical to physical fact of a sound … in series of discrete particles strung together (by Keats, etc.) with gaps…. (19—20)
The last statement in this quotation contains Grenier’s linguistic definition of a word: “a series of discrete particles strung together … with gaps.” And, as well, it contains a definition of language’s minimal meaningful unit, the morpheme: “’meaning’ identical to physical fact of a sound.” While these abstract definitions derived from linguistics are at odds with the sensuous language Grenier uses for Keats (“’dense & rich,’ tongued,” “milking” of words), they are entirely appropriate for Clark Coolidge’s non-narrative text Suite V. Coolidge’s Suite V is a paradigmatic example of the minimal pairs of sound difference — such as the meaning-making difference between the s and z in sip and zip — that constitutes the system of a language. Suite V features one word centred and typed at the top and one word centred and typed at the bottom of alternating pages for a total of seventeen pages. Here are three sequential pages, with the two slashes indicating the empty page space.
hats
//
gars
pins
//
wens
webs
//
cups
Each word is one syllable long and ends with the same bound morpheme, the suffix -s. The sequence of pages I’ve shown here stands out from the rest of Suite V in that it presents two words from specialized vocabularies: ichthyologists and some fishers know “gars” as plural for “a fish of the Pike or Esox family,” and medical doctors and some patients know “wens” as plural for “sebaceous cystic tumour under the skin, occurring chiefly on the head”* (Oxford English Dictionary). These slight irregularities function to heighten readers’ awareness of the structural integrity of the text, focusing their attention on the lexical level of language and on the relational movement of phonemic differentiation between words. Each word-pairing demonstrates the structure of language itself in the abstract, a synchronic system of differential phonemes, what the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure called langue.
And each demonstrates what the poet Bruce Andrews calls, in a moment of pique, “chaise langue.” Andrews has recently invited readers to “bring the internal word investigations.” The English language reputedly has a comparatively high number of unused morphemic slots in many of its words (we say “pluralistic” not “pluralitic”), slots that could be filled to form productive new words. Andrews’s three long poems in his book You Can’t Have Everything … Where Would You Put It! search out those morphemic vacancies to create new words conforming to morphological rules. One is the word lacerability in the line
lacerability per lahlahlah syllables in touch
that converts the verb lacerate by way of two suffixes — -able and -ability — into this overstuffed noun. In other lines, Andrews tests the limits of word-form by drawing attention to discrepancies that a letter or two can make in identifying whether a sound- and letter-sequence is a syllable, a morpheme, or just a letter in the phonetic alphabet, and how exactly it is to be pronounced:
oring^hon
......................
aterial^m
......................
dling^mid
In contrast, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, in “Sclebiscite,” tries to expunge all morphological proprieties from the insides of words.
p a n a x
Retreaxelle
w o m
p o u t
neutricidic frustrum
The word with the capital first letter, “Retreaxelle,” suggests a product-name composed of the oxymoronic sound-blend of “retreat” and “excel.” Word-form play also occurs within an existing product-name, “panax,” which is a type of ginseng: the extra spacings on either side of each interior letter — the “gaps,” to use Robert Grenier’s term — test our sense of the identifying boundaries of a written word. The astonishing “neutricidic” leans on both sound play and faux morphemes. One route through its construction is as follows:
“neutricidic” nutrition → nutricide (as in suicide, genocide, insecticide, etc.) → nutricidic (with sound of word acidic added) → neutricidic, which therefore cumulatively suggests the quality of a subatomic suicide (perhaps a nuclear plant meltdown? or self-destructive personality?)
I mentioned that most poets don’t alter word-form norms — for me, though, this means that in the classroom I can simultaneously invoke general linguistics principles of the norms of the English language and at the same time describe rare or singular poems. For example, I can specifically describe poems that test the norms of word-form boundaries. Deviation is only perceptible against a fully conscious recognition of language norms constituting everyday language use.
There is a role for the formally innovative text and its student reader/writer in the creative writing classroom: to perceive how perception itself is constituted by deviation from a language norm. And there is a lesson about language norms. After all, such norms may appear to be based on intuition. But they are in fact historically informed, socially contingent constructions that change over cultural time as language changes due to the ways it is spoken by different groups of people. A lesson, or hope, is that coming to perceive how perception itself is constituted by deviation will open students to language beyond the classroom — by using what linguist Hermese E. Roberts calls their “third ear.” “Could it be,” she wonders, “that we have used our two ears to listen to the communication-network variety of English for so long, we unconsciously have shut ourselves off from hearing, understanding, appreciating, and enjoying the colorful language varieties minted and used by specific groups of people?” Thus the distinctive use of the word “stone” in my title, which comes from a song by the seventies soul group the Stylistics. In The Third Ear: A Black Glossary, Roberts defines “stone” as “adj., adv. used to intensify the quality of another word; i.e. a stone fox is a very beautiful girl; I stone took care of that means I really took care of that.” A lesson, then, in which language refuses standards — “the norm” itself changes: in new slang words, in new grammatical phrases, in poetry.
Acknowledgements
A modified excerpt from this essay appears under the title “Crashing the Craft Zone” in Toward. Some. Air.: Remarks on Poetics, edited by Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath (Banff, AB: Banff Centre Press, 2015), 224 —28.
Works Cited
Andrews, Bruce. You Can’t Have Everything … Where Would You Put It! London: Veer, 2011. Print.
Coolidge, Clark. Suite V. New York: Adventures in Poetry, 1973. Eclipse Online Archive. Ed. Craig Dworkin. Web. 31 July 2012.
Grenier, Robert. “Hedge-Crickets Sing.” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Eds. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Print.
Nichol, bp. The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader. Eds. Lori Emerson and Darren Wershler-Henry. Toronto: Coach House, 2007. Print.
Lusk, Dorothy Trujillo. “Sclebiscite.” W6. Kootenay School of Writing. Web. 10 Aug. 2011.
Roberts, Hermese E. The Third Ear: A Black Glossary. Chicago: English Institute of America, 1971. Print.
Saroyan, Aram. Complete Minimal Poems. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2007. Print.
Simpson, Paul. Stylistics. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
“So Good, It’s RiDQulous!” Dairy Queen TV Commercial. YouTube. Web. 27 July 2012.
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. 1914. Toronto: BookThug, 2008. Print.
The Stylistics. “I’m Stone in Love with You.” By T. Bell, Linda Creed, and Anthony Bell. Round 2. Avco Records, 1972. LP.
Wieners, John. Selected Poems. New York: Grossman, 1972. Print.
* I would like to thank Cy Strom for help with the words wens and gars.