Language means things, but no language is only its meanings: any word, said aloud, has a sound, and every phrase is also, in physicists' terms, a set of waves moving through air, produced by tongue, pharynx, larynx, lungs, etc., as they act on the mix of gases we inhale or exhale. Since (at least) the heyday of Gertrude Stein, some poets have tried to focus on speech as physical event, on how brains make tongues create not meanings but sounds. These poets do not just complicate, but nearly sever, links between sound ('t' + 'r' + 'ee') and meaning (what happens when you think of a tree).
