Contributor’s Marginalia: Erin O’Luanaigh on “Call the Mouth” by Eric Tran

“The lips, the tip of the tongue, and the teeth” is a phrase familiar to anyone who has taken voice lessons or sung in a choir. The cleverness of the oft-used vocal warm-up, aside from its pert alliteration and assonance, lies in its invocation of the names of parts of the mouth to exercise them: saying the word “lips” calls the reciter’s attention to her own as they press together to form the “p,” and are drawn slightly apart by the “s”; likewise, the tongue’s tip brushes the back of the teeth or passes between them in pronouncing “the tip of the tongue.” And even “the teeth,” if incapable of exercising its subjects, reveals them with their own name.

There’s something of this cleverness in Eric Tran’s “Call the Mouth,” whose title instructs us to use our mouths to name our mouths. Or to call to our mouths. Or, perhaps, to discover our mouths’ calling— to vocalize its vocation.

And what list of names or callings does Tran provide? Some, like the opening “shotgun,” are—pardon me—tongue-in-cheek. (The “mouth” at the end of a shotgun’s barrel is known, rather perversely, as a muzzle.) Other metaphors seem logical enough. “Honey / suckle” is enjambed to isolate the verb “suckle,” a suitably mouthy word. “Candy / stash” is delightful, and “whistle / blower” sensical, if figuratively suggestive and complex.

Others prove more difficult. A “sun- / catcher” refracts the light of the sun, much as a chime harnesses the wind, yet Tran names the visual, not the aural, mediator. “Oil / slick” might conjure an image of an over-lipsticked mouth. And the crafty may recognize “whip / stitch” as one used to sew two pieces of fabric together, recalling the binding of a book. It seems as unlikely a name for the mouth as “chapter / book,” “root / water,” or “hard / part.”

Still, I wouldn’t quarrel with the inclusion of any of Tran’s names. Like the aforementioned vocal exercise, the poem’s rhymes and chimes give it a locomotive power that seems inevitable. Not to suggest that the poem is merely a tongue-twister—the chanting repetitions of assonance and consonance across and down the two columns of its form are best likened to a kind of antiphon, even an incantation (from the root “incantare,” to enchant, itself from “cantare,” to sing). It is also a concrete poem: on its side, its two curved columns become lips.

Further, almost all of the nouns within are compound, and almost all are enjambed at the hinge of each word, requiring the eye to continually jump down a line as if descending a staircase. (I can’t think of steps without a scale, without music.) And perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to note the poem’s similarities to another famous concrete poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which uses enjambment to trick and delight the reader. (Williams, that patron saint of doctor-poets, must have blessed the work of Tran, himself a doctor.)

In his essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging,” Auden looks as far back as Genesis to find literature’s “Proto-poet,” Adam, who was tasked with naming all the world’s creatures. The act of naming, Auden argues, is a poetical act—it is the vocation of the poet to call things by their names. Thus, by calling the mouth, the very apparatus used for calling, Tran isn’t just making a meta-reference. He is reminding us, through the canny musicality of his list, that producing art is the mouth’s highest calling.