“Prosody” is words saying more than words can ever say. Our bodies congealed around the formative energies of the phonemes in order that they be spoken. As such, prosody is the composing of that of which we’re made with that of which we’re made. It’s the immediate medium and means of our mutual bioregulation and co-constituting.

To back up a bit: the word “prosody” comes from Greek prosodia “tune” or “speech set to song.” The art of prosody as practiced by poets is typically concerned with sound-patterning and page-dependent spatial design, drawing on basic elements of composition such as pitch, stress, alliteration, loudness, syllable count, cadence, phrasing, rhyme, lineation, enjambment, duration of juncture, speech rhythm, syntactic-repetition, strophe, page-specific word placement and handwriting, ostensibly in order to heighten the meaning or opacity of language. Non-acoustic, retinal, transcriptive, typographic devices such as font-choice, scare quotes, boldface, striking-through, overprinting, and word-spacing can also be read prosodically, as an extra-lexical score or performance notation. Facial expression and gesture are also parts of the total performance of live prosody. The poem’s stored performance on the page or screen might be its only presence, written non-aurally for no ulterior stage, as pure-page or solely-monitored prosody untransduced from prior or commensurate vocalization, awaiting the metabolic speed of diffusion on paper or speed of light electronic transmission.

The sciences of prosody focus on the expressive features of the spoken word not necessarily encoded in the neutrality of the lexical, grammatical levels of language and include fields such as phonology, phonosemantics, psychoacoustics and prosodically-relevant literary theory from the Natya Shastra to Russian Formalism to Saussurian structuralism to New Feminist Literary Criticism.

The physics of sound and the principles of energy as vibration and environment as energetic, also factor into a fuller participation in prosodic plenitude. Auditory science, acoustic ecology, transductive technology and telecommunications allow us to constitute ourselves more acutely in a lived mechanical and electromagnetic spatiality.

Intonation of voice activates a child’s parasympathetic system, telling her it’s safe to be sensory, to learn, to relate and to love. Or, it communicates otherwise. The Zulu expression umuntu ngumuntu nagabantu comes to mind: “a person is a person because of other people.” Our ability to be intimate is tuned by the tautening or loosening of the smallest skeletal muscle in the body, the stapedius, which is innervated by the quality of our voices via the ventral vagal pathway. With the compounding of economic, ecological and inequity crises, as what was once “mere” stress can easily turn to traumatization (if for one, for all), the medium (of prosody) must be the medicine. In the words of poet George Quasha, “healing is a function of how we address ourselves.”