moved by sound

The kind of poem that while reading it silently you can feel your lips and tongue begin to move.

looking up

A poet waits on a tongue of fire to settle over his head.

--
Acts 2:1
1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.

2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

3 And there appeared unto them separated tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

forward speaking

One hopes a book becomes a tongue that won’t be still.

word grist

Mouth and tongue, mortar and pestle: Break down the words into syllable and phoneme.

engaging tongue and ear

Tonight I read Yeats aloud for about an hour, and I shall do this. An hour in the morning and an hour at night. Up to the inventing of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after that, all reading was done aloud….Eliot says the best thing a poet can do is read aloud poetry as much as he can….Silent reading only employs the parts of the brain which are used for vision. Not all the brain. This means a silent reader’s literary sense becomes detached from the motor parts and the audio parts of the brain which are used in reading aloud—tongue and ear.

—Ted Hughes in a letter to Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar and Giroux, 1956), selected and edited by Christopher Reid.

weights and measures

Each word weighed and measured upon the scale of the tongue.

ready writer

My heart is inditing a good matter; my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

Psalm 45, King James Bible

n.b.: My daughter graduated with her M.A. from Teacher's College at Columbia this afternoon. The convocation was held in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on 110th & Amsterdam. I paid a visit to The Poets' Corner in the cathedral. The passage above is inscribed in the stone wall behind the various plaques honoring Bradstreet, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Jeffers, Hayden, etc.

whose words are these

They are the coin of our tongue, but words cannot be owned.

instructions

Be patient and observe. Wait and listen. Hold it and be still. Place it on your tongue. Then breathe in.

music and muscle

It was a poem with many tongue holds.

kayak tongue

Let your kayak tongue drop into the rapids of speech.

with a spoon

With so much music and delicious diction on the tongue, you wanted to read the poem with a spoon. Or to hear it read aloud...because the ear is a kind of spoon.

streamlined

The perfect poem is as streamlined as the tongue.

slip it under the tongue

Short poem: So easy to slip under the tongue, to smuggle into silence.

the tongue refuses to lie still

Reading the poem silently my tongue refused to lie still in my mouth.

strop them upon your tongue

Like an itinerant knife sharpener, the poet should try to find words in need of a good honing. And, if need be, he should strop them on his tongue a few times until they have a bright new edge.