Word Choice

A lecture by Jonathan McClure

Initial Considerations — 0:00:01

Word choice is one of those topics where almost everything is relevant, and the list of considerations is long enough that any starting point is somewhat arbitrary. Here are some of the most useful lenses.

The music of the word—how it sounds, and whether the sound reinforces the meaning you want to convey. A rock and a stone are semantically almost identical, but they feel different and sound different.

Denotation and connotation—what a word literally means versus what it implies. Argue and bicker mean roughly the same thing denotatively; bicker suggests something childish and trivial, argue something more adult or substantive.

Etymology, history, and associations—some words come pre-loaded with resonances. Garden and serpent carry the Adam and Eve story whether you summon it or not. Spring carries renewal and hope as baked-in associations. Latinate words tend to sound formal and distancing (investigate, illuminate); their Germanic equivalents tend to sound earthier and more direct (look into, light up).

Tone and register—high literary versus conversational, elevated versus street-level. Your word choices contribute significantly to the sense of who is speaking.

Implied story—a well-chosen word can do the work of a sentence of context. One example: Sundays too implies the father did this every other day of the week as well, without having to say so.

Voice and characterization—the vocabulary a speaker uses tells us who they are.

The sound of sense—Robert Frost’s term for the way the rhythms and sounds of words convey emotional meaning that exists independently of semantic content. Even through a door, with the words obscured, you can sometimes tell whether two people are arguing or making up.

One participant added an important practical point: context. A word might be perfect in isolation and wrong in its surrounding sentence. Word choice is always also about the other words around it.

Those Winter Sundays — 0:06:00

Robert Hayden’s poem is a masterclass in implication. A child remembers his father waking early on Sundays to make the cold house warm, polishing the child’s shoes, and being met only with indifference.

The word too in the first line—Sundays too, my father got up early—does the work of an entire backstory in three letters. We understand immediately that this was every day, that Sunday offered no exception. A clumsier version would say so explicitly.

Blue-black cold makes us think of a bruise. The color carries injury and violence as an undertone. Combined with fearing the chronic angers of that house, it hints at physical intimidation without ever stating it—and the speaker himself may not be fully conscious of the implication.

The sonic texture of cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather is dense: the recurring hard K sounds of cracked, ached, weekday sound genuinely achy, like something cracking or catching.

The closing phrase—love’s austere and lonely offices—marks a shift in register. The diction becomes suddenly more archaic, more elevated. Offices in the sense of duties or vocations is unusual and slightly old-fashioned. Austere carries both gravity and deprivation. And father, throughout, rather than dad or pop: formal, respectful, but also distant. The adult speaker looking back can see the father’s love now in a way he couldn’t as a child, but the distance remains.

My Papa’s Waltz — 0:15:00

Roethke’s poem treats a similar subject—a complicated relationship with a father—with an entirely different set of choices. My papa rather than my father: immediately more intimate, more vulnerable, more childlike. The first image is whiskey on the breath.

The poem is structured as a waltz: three beats per line, mimicking three-four time. The whiskey on your breath / could make a small boy dizzy. You can hear it. The poet is recreating the sensation of being spun around by a slightly drunk, physically rough, essentially affectionate father—in the meter itself.

Romped, countenance (old-fashioned but apt), unfrown (a made-up word that works precisely because it captures the effort of a face that doesn’t want to soften)—the language is more playful than Hayden’s, more willing to lean into the dance rather than away from it.

Turtle — 0:20:00

Kay Ryan’s poem about a turtle is a study in how sound can enact subject. The poem is full of internal rhyme—nearly every line—turtle/hard roll, four-oared/afford, grasses/graceless, dragging/packing case places. The density of rhyme and near-rhyme makes the poem physically difficult to read quickly; you have to slow down and work at it, which is appropriate for an animal that cannot move quickly and for whom every small slope is a challenge.

The compound words are ungainly in ways that feel deliberate: four-oared is hard to say at any speed. The language bounces between registers—stuck up to the axle (mechanics of a car) versus everything optimal (theoretical)—creating a tone that is both teasing and respectful. The turtle’s indignity is observed with genuine attention.

The closing line—patience, the sport of truly chastened things—does something interesting: sport is everyday, chastened is elevated, and together they give the turtle a kind of dignity that the rest of the poem’s comedy might otherwise deny. You leave the poem feeling that this creature has earned its patience. One participant noted a quiet resonance between patience and chastened, a near-rhyme that creates a small sense of inevitability.

The Wild Iris — 0:28:00

Louise Glück’s poem—from a collection largely spoken by flowers—operates in a register that would be hard to sustain in a human speaker: prophetic, biblical, utterly humorless, deadly serious. The wild iris speaks from having survived winter underground, addresses the reader directly, and describes the terror of surviving as consciousness buried in the dark earth.

The diction choices reflect the speaker’s non-human nature. We get branches of the pine shifting, the weak sun flickering over the dry surface, the stiff earth bending a little—details a plant would notice and care about. The stiff earth matters to something that has to push through it to reach light. We don’t get descriptions of human death, because the wild iris knows what humans call death from the outside, not from within.

The tone is uncompromising. This flower is not going to soften its message, not going to go out of its way to be likable. It will tell you what it knows and you will attend. Glück’s flowers in this collection are consistently scary and aggressive, which shouldn’t work—talking flowers risk becoming Disney-cute—but works because the flowers are so fierce about their authority.

One participant heard coffin wood in branches of the pine shifting and the body of the earth receiving burial in the stiff earth bending a little. The poem seems to reach beyond the iris’s limited vantage point into something larger: the collection as a whole is partly about a poet’s despair, silence, and return to speech.

Big Grab — 0:38:00

Tony Hoagland is interested in a particular problem: the traditional concerns of poetry (love, death, meaning) haven’t changed, but we live among plastic fridge magnets in the shape of carrots and billboard advertisements for melted cheese. How do you write poems that are honest about that world?

“Big Grab” is about a corn chip company quietly reducing the number of chips in each bag while keeping the name Big Grab, and the way language gets quietly distorted to serve commercial purposes. Confucius, Hoagland claims, predicted exactly this—that words would get “crooketer and crooketer.” This is obviously not what Confucius said, and the speaker knows it. He’s a little ridiculous. He also can’t stop buying the chips.

The poem plays with tonal register deliberately: see how she beckons to the river of late night cars; see how the tipsy drivers swerve under the breathalyzer moon mimics Romantic apostrophe, the elevated O hear the poet! mode—and does it ironically, but not entirely emptily. There’s something genuinely evocative about that image. The breathalyzer moon is funny and also weirdly sad.

And then the speaker fizzles: No wonder I want something more or less large and salty for lunch. No wonder I stare into space while eating it. He’s bought the chips. He’s eating them. He got it all figured out and it made no difference. The moral high ground has become a bag of corn chips and a vacant stare.

One participant noted that most of the poem’s vocabulary is monosyllabic—which is part of how it gets to the point so quickly and cuts through the grandiosity it’s also performing.

The Sound of Sense — 0:46:00

Frost’s concept—that the sounds of words convey meaning independent of their semantic content—can be illustrated with a short poem by Stevie Smith that consists mostly of invented words: “Our bog is dude, our bog is dude”—children repeating a phrase that means nothing but takes on an increasingly ominous, fanatical quality through rhythm and repetition. We don’t know what a bog is or what it means for one to be dude, but the cadence creates a sense of dogma and menace. This is the sound of sense working without sense.

Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky works the same way. The emotional texture of the nonsense words is palpable even before you can parse a single sentence.

The Value of Making Up Words — 0:52:00

When is it acceptable to invent a word? Generally: when the word you need doesn’t exist, or when a neologism captures something more precisely than any existing word can. A participant offered a perfect example: trying to describe an absence she called missing you-ness. Missing you wasn’t quite right; it needed to be a thing, a quality with substance. Adding -ness nominalized the phrase and gave it a texture—and also implied, usefully, that there is no word for this, which says something about how hard the feeling is to name.

The question to ask is whether a reader can decipher the invented word immediately and naturally. If yes, it probably works. If it draws attention to its own strangeness in a way that interrupts the poem, reconsider.

A Practical Exercise — 0:56:00

One approach borrowed from John Gardner: describe a barn from the perspective of two different people—one who has just committed a murder, one who has just fallen in love. You cannot mention the murder or the love. You cannot use those words or any obvious synonym. Everything must be conveyed through what you choose to notice about the barn and how you describe what you notice. The exercise teaches how much a word choice reveals about the person choosing it, and how much of the character’s interior state can be implied through externals.

Another approach: take a word in a poem you’re working on that carries significant weight. Try five different synonyms. See what each one changes about the tone, the implications, the music of the surrounding lines. Often a single swap shifts everything.

Closing Thoughts — 1:00:00

Reading things you don’t like can teach you as much as reading things you do. If a poem leaves you cold, try to figure out why—what word choices, what register, what tonal decisions create that response—and use that as a guide about what you’ll avoid. The more widely you read, the more possibilities become available, even when (especially when) those possibilities are things you would never do yourself.