Person on the Page

This semester I assigned my creative writing students to write a concrete poem—one in which words are placed on the page so that they create an image that helps to convey the poet’s message. One student wrote her poem in the form of a square. When we workshopped it in class, I suggested that the message of the poem might be more richly conveyed three-dimensionally, as a cube, perhaps?

One day after class, the student handed me a paper cube with her revised poem written on its surfaces. She explained to me how she had re-imagined her message in three dimensions and how she had decided how to place the words on the cube.

The poem was arranged in colors, she said, progressing from one end of the spectrum to the other.  The colors corresponded to letters in the words of the poem. She pointed out specific letters on the surfaces of the cube and showed how they progressed across the color spectrum. “You see,” she said, “to me, the letter “A” is yellow.”

Her comment suggests that my student is one of many who experience synesthesia—a kind of wire-crossing in the brain that results in a mixing of sensory information.  People with synesthesia may attribute tastes to words, aromas to concepts, colors to symbols, or other such sensory combinations.  While synesthesia is described as having the wires in one’s brain crossed, it is not considered to be a neurological disorder, and it does not affect one’s ability to function normally in one’s environment.

A few years ago, another of my students sent me this TikTok video recorded by a woman who says that people’s names stimulate her senses in dramatic ways.  In it, she happens to be explaining her sensory response to my name. 

While synesthesia may manifest itself as a mere curiosity or perhaps as a nuisance for most, for an artist, the experience is highly useful.  This blending of the senses allows writers, for instance, to create arrestingly descriptive language.

Consider some of these synesthetic lines.

From Oscar Wilde’s play Salome in which a voice has an aroma and a visual image is a sound:

Thy voice was a censor that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard strange music.  

From Emily Dickinson’s poem #591 (I heard a fly buzz when I died), in which the buzz is described as having a color:

With Blue—uncertain—stumbling Buzz
Between the light—and me–

From Amy Lowell’s poem “The Taxi,” in which sensory stimuli are compellingly mixed:

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.

***

Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

Since my student said to me, “The letter “A” is yellow,” I have been preoccupied with the possible ways that conscious combinations of sensory language might enliven my own writing. 

Might they enliven yours as well?