Marianne Boruch: Poetic Sound (July 1993)

“Poetry,” Marianne Boruch suggests, “is the closest literary form we have to silence.” Boruch draws on music, ornithologists’ study of birdsong, and poems by Bishop, Kees, Hayden, Eliot, and Berryman, to show how the “voiced pause” in a poem works in tension with its sounds to create a kind of “audible solitude,” a private current that runs against the poem’s more public elements.