I said so once or twice or thrice before (see my blogs for "Voice and discovery 12.11.19"; "Voice, tone, movement and meaning 12.7.19"; "Reading poems aloud 11.21.18.") and and I'm here to say it again. Poems begin in sound, pure utterance without the baggage of ideas like "music," "noise," "oratory," "feeling," "meaning." They begin where all animal utterance begins, in the larynx, which in a human being--like you, like me--sits low in the throat where it can shape airflow into music, oratory, noise, drone, and poetry.
So said Darwin, if we're to accept the premise of this new book, reviewed in Sunday's NYT Book Review. Here's what the reviewer has to say about the Darwin connection: ". . . the notion that the melody and rhythms of speech are what move us toward language." The book is This Is the Voice, by John Colapinto, and its subject is the role played by the human larynx and lungs in the acquisition of language. The thesis' implications for poetry couldn't be greater.
The reviewer writes,
Fetuses can't make out a mother's words from inside a womb . . . but they can hear prosody: inflections, accents, the rises and dips and pauses of a sentence. Colapinto shares research that suggests we exit the womb with this scaffolding of language well in place.
We are born to sing!
We've developed this ability as a result of standing erect on two feet, an action which sank the larynx deeper into the throat, nearer the source of the air we use to refine sound--I'll have to read the book to get to the science--into speech, thus making human language possible.
Of course, what use this capability unless we turn it to expression, feeling, meaning? Poetry is all these things or it's not really poetry, just jabber, just noise. But it's reassuring, somehow, to know that our art is part of our biological history, our evolution as a species.
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