Home › Glossary › Letter D

dissonant poetry

Sound
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

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

Poetry that deliberately employs clashing, abrasive sounds—like cacophony or plosives—to create expressive dissonance.

Detailed Definition
dissonant poetry: Verse that deliberately employs harsh sounds, irregular rhythms, or jarring combinations of elements to create discord, tension, or unsettling effects. Dissonance can operate through cacophony, metrical disruption, semantic contradiction, or tonal clashes. This technique contrasts with harmonious verse and can express conflict, anxiety, violence, or resistance to conventional beauty. Dissonant poetry emerged prominently in modernist and avant-garde movements questioning traditional aesthetic values. Understanding dissonance reveals how poetry uses sound and structure not just for beauty but to embody conflict, difficulty, and challenging content through formal means.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel,” jarring enjambment and harsh consonants create dissonant poetry of psychic rupture; In Wilfred Owen’s war poems, dissonant sounds expose the lie of “dulce et decorum est”; In Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art,” dissonant diction (“Poems that kill”) weaponizes poetry; In Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” dissonant juxtapositions of polite speech and racial violence create poetic tension; In Ocean Vuong’s “Time Is a Mother,” dissonant blends of Vietnamese and English render diasporic fracture.
Additional Notes
Dissonant poetry employs harsh, clashing sounds through consonant clusters, irregular rhythms, or jarring word combinations. This technique creates tension and reflects discord, often used for themes of conflict or unease.
Also Known As
Clashing poetry discordant verse jarring lyric dissonant composition Atonal poetry Atonal verse Cognitive dissonance verse
Skip to main content