Rituals of Reinforcement: Poetry, Algorithms, and the Human Ear
Featuring Caitlin Doyle in The Old Sonic Gods: Poets on the Sound of Poetry Series
The Old Sonic Gods: Poets on the Sound of Poetry
Curated by Marginalia’s George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism, Amit Majmudar
What distinguishes poetry from the writing found in online posts, articles, technical manuals, cookbooks, and textbooks?
For centuries, across several cultures, the answer was simple: meter. (Rhyme was never a feature of much classical poetry, whether Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin.) The past century and a half has witnessed an unprecedented, now worldwide shift toward nonmetrical poetry, poetry that substitutes line length for meter as the principle of measure. Vers libre first flickered in the French of Jules Laforgue, blazed in early 20th-century English, and, thanks to the dominance of Anglo-American culture, has spread as a wildfire to much of world poetry.
We can conceive of that cultural shift in poetry as a loss, but in reality, it has complicated the relationship of poets to the sounds of poetry. The old sonic gods linger, sometimes intact, sometimes in fragmented or disguised forms. Transfigurations and negotiated degrees of traditional practice persist.
Each poet who distinguishes his or her writing from prose successfully—and not all contemporary poets even make the attempt—arrives at his or her own relationship to poetic music. I invited some poets who have accomplished this to share their ideas on sound in poetry, along with an original poem to let us listen in on the music their ideas make.
This contribution features poet Caitlin Doyle, whom I asked to reflect on sound in poetry, her own relationship to aural effects in language, and the way that sonic choices inform her poem “Love Letter to the Algorithm.”
-Amit Majmudar, George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism
Rituals of Reinforcement: Poetry, Algorithms, and the Human Ear
by Caitlin Doyle
For millennia, beginning with poetry’s roots as an oral mode of expression, poem-makers have used the sonic properties of words to preserve history, tell stories, teach the young, and construct works of art that persist in the human memory. By “human memory,” I mean both the memories of individual readers and the collective cultural recollection accrued across generations. Language that relies on sound to reinforce its content has long infiltrated every aspect of our discourse, from how we convey knowledge (“in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”) to how we preserve social mores (“loose lips sink ships”) to how we sell ideas, products, and even politicians to one another (“Tippecanoe and Tyler, too”).
The connection between poetry and memory also stands central to my personal relationship with the art form. As someone who fell under poetry’s spell at a young age, I often feel as though I’m writing my way forward to get back to that beginning. Childhood encounters with Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Wind,” and Louis MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music” spurred me to view poetry as a form of enchantment that both courts and escapes the analytical mind. Though I didn’t fully understand many of the poems that I read as a kid, their rhythms allowed me to sense in word-music what I couldn’t yet apprehend in meaning.
When I think about what the most enduring poems have in common, no matter how much they might differ in subject and style, I find myself returning to the presence of sonic patterns that generate frisson through repetition and variation. Nothing holds me in greater thrall to a poem than when a poet creates a set of ear-expectations, and then meets or disrupts those expectations in ways that deepen the language’s connotations. I love how sound and content in poetry sometimes reinforce each other, and at other times pull against each other to heighten the tension in a poem.
One of my most consuming wishes as a writer is to reconnect readers with the primal delight they first experienced through nursery rhymes, lullabies, playground songs, and commercial jingles, while also feeding their grown-up appetites for emotional resonance, sonic complexity, and intellectual depth. I’m guided by the following question: Without creating a meaningful interaction between sound and content, whether through harmony, dissonance, or a combination of both, how can a poet compel readers to drop their defenses so that the poem can do its full work on them?
The same question drives me as a teacher. I encourage students to engage with the assigned material as pleasure readers before attempting an interpretation of what they’ve read. I want them to learn how to receive language with their guards down and their senses alert. In an ideal world, all young people would discover poetry before the fears that shape so many adults’ relationships with the art form take hold. By the time most freshmen enter a college classroom, they have already started developing resistances to poetry. My most urgent task is to help them understand that, if they can tune into a poem’s sounds, they can begin to access the language’s full range of implications.
I often start the semester by sharing a statement from the great Scottish poet Don Paterson: “A poem is just a little machine for remembering itself.” During my high school years, a teacher wrote that particular quote at the top of a slapdash poem I’d turned in for an English assignment. She explained that what I’d written lacked the characteristics that would distinguish it as a poem rather than a piece of prose with randomly broken lines. When I talk about Paterson’s assertion with my own students, my goal is to help them recognize the difference between simply describing an experience in words and using sound to make that experience linger in the reader’s consciousness long after a first encounter with the text.
Paterson’s quote also provides an interesting entry point for thinking about the role of sound in the poem that accompanies this reflection. A computer algorithm, similar to what Paterson says of poems, “is a little machine for remembering itself.” I worry about how, though most of us recognize that algorithms divide us socially and politically, we’re largely unable to resist their pull. As I made my way through drafts of “Love Letter to the Algorithm,” I realized with ever-growing clarity just how analogous sonic patterns in language are to the recurrences that dominate algorithmic systems.
Because algorithms create rituals of reinforcement in our brains, I found myself crafting “Love Letter to the Algorithm” with an abundance of alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhyme. I discovered that I wanted the poem’s sounds not just to evoke algorithmic feedback loops but also to merge aural playfulness with darker thematic implications. It occurred to me while I worked that this approach to tone, which I came to see as rooted in an amped-up acoustic artifice, related in significant ways to my decision to cast the piece as a “love letter.” Algorithms simultaneously bring us pleasure and harm us by immersing us in self-limiting cycles of input. Because the speaker gets caught up unwittingly in that dangerous dichotomy, I sought to make the language’s tonal elements underscore the irony of the “love letter” aspect of the poem.
My hope is that the poem’s sonic atmosphere mirrors the dopamine-inducing and often perilously seductive powers that both romantic love and computer algorithms exercise over us, as demonstrated by the speaker’s surrender to the algorithm (“you know I couldn’t leave you if I tried”) despite recognizing the “trap” that waits around the corner. Of course, whether or not the sound-content relationship in “Love Letter to the Algorithm” fully realizes all of the aims I’ve articulated isn’t for me to say. As T.S. Eliot wrote, while meditating on what it means to be a poet, “for us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” What is our business as poets, as Eliot’s own poems testify, is to attempt the difficult work of understanding language’s sonic capacities.
Without seeking to harness the potencies of echo and refrain, I’m convinced that we have no chance of making poems that transcend the finite nature of our bodies. For that reason, what drives me most as a writer is a desire to tap into the art form’s ages-old emphasis on sonic memorability while exploring subject matter that feels both timely and timeless in our living context. If a poem is “a little machine for remembering itself,” I believe that a crucial part of building the machine is learning to get out of its way. Rather than viewing content as the immutable center of a poem and sound as a secondary force that exists only to serve that content, the strongest poets allow sound to determine a poem’s content as often as the other way around.
In a society shaped by algorithms, technologies that cull and deliver information increasingly short-circuit and limit our memories, both personal and cultural. It’s more important than ever for poets and their readers to recognize how an attunement to the sounds of language can save the art form—if not the world at large—from what the speaker of “Love Letter to the Algorithm” encounters. While the speaker faces a reality in which we’re helpless to escape the “feeds that feed / on feedback loops,” where our “searches” are “scripted” for us and predetermined codes “rig the trap / the same each time,” poetry composed by the human ear gives us an opportunity, as it always has, to honor the patterns of the past while adding new and lasting variations of our own.
Caitlin Doyle is a poet and educator whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Slowdown, The Yale Review, Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press), American Life in Poetry, the PBS News Hour Online Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She has received awards, scholarships, and fellowships through the Yaddo Colony, the MacDowell Colony, the James Merrill House, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, among others. Caitlin has taught writing and literature as the Writer-In-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, the Emerging Writer-In-Residence at Penn State Altoona, a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University, an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, and the Writer-In- Residence at St. Albans School. Most recently, Caitlin taught as Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Writer-In-Residence at Washington & Jefferson College. She earned a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, where she was the Associate Editor of The Cincinnati Review. Caitlin is a faculty member at the Frost Farm Poetry Conference, and she serves as Interviews Editor for Literary Matters.
