Vocalize and listen to the types of sounds made by different consonants.Voiced and unvoiced explosives are the distinctions for dissonance. An unvoiced explosive forms as a simple breath explosion, but your vocal chords are not used. "Bite/strike" are dissonant rhymes with unvoiced explosives. Combinations of words with a soft "th" as in "thing" or with a hard "th" as in "that" are examples of unvoiced and voiced explosives, respectively. Use only unvoiced or voiced explosives; do not combine the two.
Apply dissonance in a poem as a system rather than inserting a single dissonant rhyme. The entire poem becomes a dissonant unit for the purpose of creating a sound that is relevant to the poem's meaning. This makes dissonance particularly difficult to apply.
Practice the different ways in which dissonant consonants combine. Other dissonant consonants include hard G or words that begin with the letter B (voiced explosives). See the chart for dissonant sounds in Additional Resources.
Read Walt Whitman's "To a Locomotive in Winter." Notice the use of "Thee," "Thy" and "The" as examples of dissonance with combinations of similar unvoiced explosives. Read the poem aloud to feel the sounds as you speak them. Gain a sense of the systematic use of dissonance throughout the poem and how the dissonant sounds relate to the poem's meaning.