The very same prof who noted my scansion errors also told me later on that it was his experience that southerners tended to stress fewer syllables, especially in comparison to someone from a northeastern, urban center, lending the southern accent some of its laziness of speed and enunciation, the slur (perhaps the “charm”?) of the drawl. Although I have largely lost (or never had much of) an accent, my fundamental orientation toward language is one of cadences incongruous with “perfect” scansion. My childhood recitation of rites from the Book of Common Prayer in my Episcopal church likely has something to do with how I think about language, as does that country music radio my mother left on for me while I slept every night.
Winnicott’s concept of one’s “fundamental orientation toward language,” the idea that, as I understand it, our earliest experiences with language deeply and irrevocably influence our ongoing usages, tendencies, and conceptualizations of language. Although my Keystone State pals could never hear the twang, these evidences perhaps make a case that there’s something inherently “southern” about my approach to English.Īt a writing conference a few years after my scansion assignment, the poet Tom Sleigh introduced to the workshop child psychologist D.W. Likewise, upon meeting her at a writing conference, the impeccably keen poet Melissa “Ranger” Range (herself a native of Johnson City, Tennessee) immediately discerned my birthplace: “You’re from Chattanooga, aren’t ya, girl?” she asked, within minutes of meeting me.
When I submitted my answers, however, the quiz generated the three best guesses for the place from which I hail: 1) Chattanooga, TN (my hometown!), 2) Louisville, KY, and 3) Huntsville, AL. I didn’t expect accuracy, as so many people in my temporary home of Pennsylvania had lamented over the fact that I didn’t have a “pleasant” Southern accent, despite having spent all of my life up until that point in the South.
When I got home and murmured these poems to myself, my pencil hovering over each syllable, I sometimes substituted in idiosyncratic stress patterns, influenced heavily by the region in which I learned to speak.Ī few years ago, I took a dialect quiz from the New York Times in which I had to answer questions like what I call the concrete or green space between two roads (“median”) and how I say “lawyer” (not “LOY-er,” but “LAW-yer,” where “-yer” is more a grace note than a syllable). The problem, I realized later, was that I’d heard my prof read aloud our poems of study, with his Minnesotan (albeit long estranged) pronunciations, and with all the natural cadences of his speech that the poem’s diction and syntax could afford. I’d gone into the assignment feeling confident that I’d be able to scan a poem, as the scansion exercises we’d done as a class had made so much intuitive sense to me. When I got back my scansion assignment, a grad school project in which I had to chart the stress patterns in a few Weldon Kees poems, I was startled to see that my prof David had revised quite a few of my notations, citing that I’d used more unstressed syllables than was correct.
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