There is much I want to say about voice, but the subject is varied and, in its own way, inexhaustible. I hope to return to it as the month goes on. But for the moment, I want us to consider just how many ways a voice can make its way onto the page, and to consider your own voice.
NaPoWriMo: April is National Poetry Writing Month!
When the writer encounters the page, what the pen reveals is a mixture of several elements, all swirling or steaming about in one’s head, ingredients that combine to make something greater than the whole. Poetry differs from prose in that it uses a kind of music to deliver its thrust, its zing. Words are a salt bomb, that twinge of tart or umami that the palate cannot miss. And, just as with actual cooking, it is often the order in which the ingredients go in, and the time they simmer, that create the finished product.
What distinguishes one writer from another, beyond the obsessions that make their way to the page, are the choices they make, and one of the most important and controlling choices will always be how the writer decides to present their ideas, how they communicate. Poetry is told in words, but the medium differs from prose, and not just by line breaks. It is entirely possible to write broken prose. There is a sense of cohesiveness, together-ness, that coalesces into a distinct sum; and a major determining factor will be the delivery of the emotion/idea.
Poems are like jokes: they are impossible to paraphrase. To get at the marrow of a poem, you must read it in its originality. (Of course, this makes poems in foreign languages far more difficult; you’re thrown back on complete trust in the translator.) And just like with jokes, it is pace, the emphasis, the vernacular, that sets up the tension and lets it resolve.
In The Poet’s Companion (pp. 115-116), Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux explain:
In poetry, the term voice has been used to describe that sense of a unique presence on the page—an unmistakable something that becomes the mark of a writer, a way of saying things that is the writer’s own. . . . We want a presence that convinces, one that engages and seduces a reader into the world of our poems, a voice a reader will want to listen to. When we fail to produce this voice, the poem fails. The reader laughs when we want her to cry, or turns away disinterestedly when we passionately want his attention. The poem doesn’t communicate what we meant; the voice is garbled, confused, talking to itself.
Intrinsic to the modulation of voice is word choice, also known as diction—the vocabulary of a piece. The first words of the first line are very important because, just like in a game, one’s first moves delimit the rest of your available choices. They set tone. (Tone operates like mood in fiction, though mood is usually connected to setting, which is not a necessary element in poetry.) While tone can certainly shift as the poem expands, if the poem drops or switches tone without warrant—without earning that change—the reader will be bewildered and often will step out of the poem to see what they missed. This is dangerous territory—the reader may lay the poem aside and never return.
So it’s important to pay attention to one’s initial word choices to see what they can offer as a springboard for the universe of words the poem is first permitted. Diction necessarily narrows one’s pool of availability. As the poem grows and utilizes more words, that universe expands (or, just as often, becomes more fine-tuned and specialized).
Style, too, becomes tangled up in this process. “Style is really interchangeable with voice, in this sense, and it’s useful to remember that style in a writer is revealed by the characteristic choices a writer makes,” Addonizio and Laux advise us. Over time, over the course of the writer’s entire span, that writer’s style makes itself known through trial and error, as well as accumulation, the reservoir the poet reflexively revisits. “Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice,” they tell us.
Consider these poems and how wildly varied the voices are, the manner in which the ideas come across on the page. First, Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923):
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Next, Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”, published in 1960:
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Contrast that with “Mr. Mine”, a piece by another confessional poet, Anne Sexton (1969):
Notice how he has numbered the blue veins
in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.
Now he goes left. Now he goes right.
He is building a city, a city of flesh.
He's an industrialist. He has starved in cellars
and, ladies and gentlemen, he's been broken by iron,
by the blood, by the metal, by the triumphant
iron of his mother's death. But he begins again.
Now he constructs me. He is consumed by the city.
From the glory of words he has built me up.
From the wonder of concrete he has molded me.
He has given me six hundred street signs.
The time I was dancing he built a museum.
He built ten blocks when I moved on the bed.
He constructed an overpass when I left.
I gave him flowers and he built an airport.
For traffic lights he handed at red and green
lollipops. Yet in my heart I am go children slow.
We have Frank O’Hara, “As Planned” (1970):
After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?
Next, take in Yehuda Amichai’s “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children”, published originally in 1955:
God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first–aid station
covered with blood.
But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.
Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of charity
that Mother handed down to us
so that their happiness may protect us
now and on other days.
Lastly, consider Ruth Stone, in her eponymous “In the Next Galaxy” (2002):
Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not
have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.
Your prompt for today is to write an original piece, between 15-25 lines long, where you consciously adopt or assume a voice. Maybe you’ll try some slang, or perhaps you’ll imitate the lyrics of a famous and/or contemporary song. Pick up a poetry anthology, if you have one in reach, and flip through to find someone to use as a counterpoint. Beg, borrow or steal, as the saying goes.
Alternatively, take one of the above pieces and rewrite it in your own way. You can recycle the theme, or you can reword it whole cloth. Bring to it your own spin. Happy writing!
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