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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.
Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example: AH0 TH IY1 N AH0 = a-THEE-na (Athena)
The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.
Quick Definition
In poetry Performance, address is the way a poet directs words, voice, attention, or gesture toward an audience, a particular listener, or an imagined figure.
Explore this topic in depth (5)
Lyric Poetry
— Lyric poetry is a broad poetic mode, not a fixed form or simply another name for song lyrics. Discover how lyrics shape experience through voice, sound, address and movement—and how reading and listening can reveal their workings.
The Elegy: Poetry of Loss, Memory and Address
— An elegy is a poem shaped by loss: it attends to someone or something absent, and asks what it means to remember. This guide explores its long history, changing forms and sounds, from intimate mourning to public grief.
Figurative Language in Poetry
— Figurative language is not ornamental extra language: it is one of poetry’s ways of making connections and testing meanings. This guide introduces metaphor, simile, personification, apostrophe and related figures, with practical steps for reading how they develop across a poem.
Acrostic Poetry
— An acrostic is a poem whose lines carry a second, vertical text through their initial letters. This guide explores its history, variants and expressive possibilities, and offers practical ways to read its audible poem alongside its visual design.
How to Hear Tone in a Poem
— Tone is the attitude a poem’s speaker takes toward a subject, a listener or themselves. Learn to hear it through word choice, pace, address, sound and change—rather than settling too quickly on one label.
Detailed Definition
Address shapes the relationship between performer and listener by making clear who is being spoken to and how directly they are being engaged. A poet may address the whole audience, a single person, an absent person, an object, or an idea. Through eye contact, vocal tone, pauses, and physical orientation, Performance can make an address feel intimate, confrontational, inviting, or ceremonial.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” the repeated “you” creates a direct address to an unnamed oppressor: “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies.” In Performance, the reader might look outward or sharpen their tone on “you” to make the challenge feel immediate.
Additional Notes
Address is closely related to apostrophe, a poetic device in which a speaker addresses someone absent, dead, imaginary, or nonhuman. A performer’s address need not be spoken through second-person language; eye contact, body position, and vocal emphasis can also indicate who is being addressed. Direct audience address can create connection and urgency, while avoiding eye contact or speaking toward an imagined person can establish distance or dramatic tension. Do not confuse address with an author’s intended audience. Address concerns the listener or figure the poem’s speaker appears to speak to within the Performance.