Phonemics

Spicer shows the inabilities of language to fully communicate in his poem “Phonemics”. The telephone is used as a metaphor for the long distance communication between individuals under any circumstance. The poem defines the separation of individuals and the impossibility for them to ever completely know another. Just as the telephone breaks, “sound into electrical impulses and put it back together,” so also do the functions of the human brain take sound and, “route to phonemes, then to bound and free morphemes, then to syntactic structures.” Spicer is referring here to the process in which sound is understood to have meaning. He points this out so the reader will realize that any language communication is “long distance” in the sense that what is heard is not meaning, but sounds which are given meaning by one’s own mind. This is important to Spicer’s poem because the meaning of the speaker is entirely at the will of the listener. It is not the speaker’s meaning which is understood by the listener, but the listener’s own meaning transferred to the voice of the speaker. Thus, individuals are left alone in the world by their own understanding of language.
Furthermore, Spicer says, “Long Distance calls to your father, your mother, your friend, your lover.” Here the word “calls” is not used, as before, as a noun, but instead the word “calls” is used as a verb. The distance is the agent of the phrase and it is calling. This realization is ominous considering that those closest to the individual are still at a distance which cannot be breached, for only the distance calls to them not the individual himself. This is all due to the way language is a meaning given by one’s self not another.