Damn pronouns! (12 30.19)

I've begun editing the poems of a book-length manuscript in the past week or so and one of the editing choices I'm faced with is the use of pronouns.  As I establish voice and persona in a poem, I must decide whether to write in the first person singular or plural, or second person or third.  I must decide whether to deploy pronouns at all, or just name the thing.  The pronoun(s) I choose or decline determine the tone of the poem I'm trying to write, in a big way.

Third person pronouns tend to push poems toward narrative.  In search of third-person narrative material, I pulled poems from my book shelf at random and came up with "The Second Sleep," the first poem in a sequence by James Dickey titled "Fathers and Sons":

Curled, too much curled, he was sleeping

In a chair too small for him, a restless chair
That held no place for his arms;

In his sleep he grew legs to replace them

As his father liftingly strained
And carried him into the next room.

All the time he settled away

A gentle man looked upon him
And then walked out of the house

And started his evergreen car.

Terrific impact, none his,
Killed him three blocks to the north.

In his second sleep the boy heard

The reared-up tearing of metal
Where a glassed-in face leapt and broke,

But to him it was something else,

An animal clash, a shock of resolving antlers,
And slept on, deeper and deeper

Into the mating season.


The next room filled with women; his nostrils
Flared, his eyes grew wide


And shot with blood under eyelids.


Brow lowered in strife, he stamped
In the laurel thicket, a herd of does


Trembling around him.  Into the rhododendron


His rival faded like rain.
He stared around wildly, head down.


In the undying green, they woke him.


Well, this choice wasn't totally random.  James Dickey always supplies, if it's narrative verse you're after.  The thing about the poem's third person narration is how completely it wipes out any hint of authorial voice or possible autobiography.  (This is not to say there's no authorial voice in this poem; stories must have storytellers, after all.)  It's possible--I don't know Dickey's biography--the story is deeply personal, that the poet recalls his own experience and feeling in the poem.  But the effect of the repeated use of "he," "him" and "his" is to bury the authorial and the personal.

There's another abiding effect from the drumbeat of third person singular pronouns in this poem: reinforcement of the poem's title and theme, "Fathers and Sons."  This narrative could be about any father and son.  The details may vary, but the sense of a fragile closeness lost so readily to chance events (chance in this sense standing in for fate) applies to any father-son relationship.  The idea that the father-son bond is broken while the boy sleeps invites Freud, not to mention one of the more universal storytelling themes: bad things happen in absence.  The third person singular not only keeps Dickey out of it, but lets you and me into the experience at some safe distance.

Writing in the second person you, either plural or singular, can render a poem intimate or public.  The singular you lets me address a lover, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a co-worker, an enemy, a mentor, a mentee, a boss, a pet, a car, even my own left hand.  It permits me to address you, the reader, as if I know you.  You, that is, lets me personify and explore an intimate connection.  You deployed as a plural lets me get on a soap box and preach or harangue to entire communities.  It makes it possible for me to point fingers (j'accuse!) at Boomers and Gen-Xers and the banking class and car salesmen.  Mainly, this plural you sets me apart from the audience of the poem I am writing, or at least from the dramatis personae of the poem.  I don't have to feel what you feel(s) or think what you think(s) or experience what you experience(s).  I can stand in my pulpit and address you en masse.

Then of course there is the generalized you, stand-in for the equally impersonal "one."  This you enables me to pontificate, moralize, share an insight, speak wisely and even ironically in the same way that we does, without my having to soil myself with "us-ness."  This you also lets you dissociate yourself in the same way, if you don't care for the particular wisdom being dispensed through my poem.  The sentence you just read deploys you in exactly the way it describes the strategy.  It lets you say, but I am me, singular me, and so not a part of this you.  Added benefit: you is thoroughly modern and American.  Only a Brit or somebody still living in the 19th Century would seriously say (or write) "one does this or that."

We and I, on the other hand, are minefields of tonality, authenticity, and credibility.  Not that many writers of poems think so.  In fact, any casual survey of what's on the internet or your local bookstore's poetry shelves suggests the opposite.  The triumphal I and all-inclusive we are more than de rigeur in contemporary poetry writing; they verge on law.  This is so, I suppose, because so many writers of all ages are taught that poetry is self-expression in the sense that its content concerns the person writing it.  Every poem I write is about me, what I had for breakfast this morning.

In this I/we universe, poems are personal statements.  They "come from the heart."  They are "authentic" because they are "true," that is, the sentiments they express are "true."  Give me a dollar for every poet who justifies his or her poem with "It's true!  It really happened that way!" and you'll make me a rich man.  In the special case of we, the voice of we poems assumes for you, the reader, a thought, an opinion, a feeling.  It's a sneaky way of projecting my way of feeling onto you, for making you part of my team, for better or worse.

You may be wondering, if you haven't given up reading this entry yet, where I'm going with this besides an end-of-decade rant about the status of contemporary poetry writing.  Here is where.  Your choice of pronouns when you write a poem says a lot about your literary and emotional agenda.  Or it should.  If you are one of those poetry writers who shy away from the authorial I, that says something about what you think poetry is, how it functions, its role in society (or at least your community), your own emotional and psychic relation to what you're writing.  Repressed, maybe?  If you are a writer who uses the first person singular pronoun exclusively, that says something about you as a writer and a person.  If you deploy we frequently in your writing, perhaps this means you understand poetry to be a wisdom-dispensing medium, that you have issues with not being listened to in your daily interactions with others, that you're alienated.

Reviewing the 65+ poems in my new manuscript, I find a pretty liberal usage of all these pronouns (except the more antique one).  More importantly, I am reminded in every instance of the decision point where one poem came to be dominated by one pronoun form or another.  Every instance was just that--a decision about the poem's ultimate point of view, voicing, tone.  This tells me that I have tried throughout this manuscript to assemble works of art, not just statements "from the heart," though every one of these poems comes exactly from there, no matter whether my personal voice--The Voice of Clark--is foregrounded or buried.  What "from the heart" means in this context is, if you're asking, a desire to make art.

Have I succeeded?  One never really knows.

Voice and discovery (12.11.19)

For writers of poetry, there is danger in using voice.

Let me put that into a lower register: voice can be risky in a poem. Voice conveys emotion; not only does it ferry the emotions of the writer to the poem, but it arouses, potentially, emotions or at least reactions and judgments in the reader and listener. Writers can't always, maybe can't ever fully, control the emotive effects of their poems in others. You go for irony or satire in your poem; your readers hear cynicism, or worse, artlessness. You intend a cry from the heart, your heart, but your reader hears peevishness. For you, the voice in your poem is one of experience and wisdom, but your readers hear Polonius or Foghorn Leghorn.

Sometimes, you can adopt a voice in a poem that others might see as appropriative and offensive, as in this story reported in the New York Times last year.

What are you up to when creating a voice or voices in a poem, and what kinds of voices do you create? (These are not rhetorical questions . . . I mean for you to ponder them in your own writing.)

Are you, like a dramatist, creating the voices of characters when writing a poem? And if you are, do you consider the motives that drive them and that make them speak as they do in your poem?

Are you, like an actor, speaking in a voice that is not your real voice? Are you using the poem to "try on" another voice, to disappear into some other person's "sound" and "sense," and if you are, why?

And if you are creating and/or inhabiting these other fictitious voices, what is your relation to them as the author? Do you, Mr./Mrs./Ms Author, have a voice in such a poem? If so, how does that voice operate--omnisciently? as a co-equal? a saboteur? an egger-on? a judge?

Here's another way of looking at voice in a poem . . . When you say "I," whom do you mean?

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Lots of questions to think about!  But back on the subject of voice and discovery, when you write a poem, you create opportunities (or problems) involving voice that can be exciting, rewarding, and highly satisfying, or sometimes off-putting, offensive, even dangerous.  

For one thing, you can create characters with voices you don't or wouldn't ordinarily attempt in other circumstances.  The example reported by the NYT I reference above is instructive: I believe that writer (a young, white male) is trying on the voice of someone he isn't and can never be (a homeless person of color).  Is he right to do that?  Does he have the right?  Many people in the twittersphere didn't think so at the time and probably don't think so today (see Roxanne Gay, quoted in the Times story).  He was accused, basically, of wearing black face.  But might he also have been trying to walk in somebody else's shoes and using one of the only tools available to him for that purpose--his art?  Was he adopting voice strategically, as a means to self-discovery?  Hmmmm . . . more questions.

For another, you can create voice modulations you may not often adopt otherwise.  What is it like to beg, to lash out, to express undying love or gratitude, to bemoan, to ridicule?  Modulating a voice in a poem can take you there.  What's it like to switch personalities or tones mid-statement or in quick succession?  To undercut one voice with another?  You can try that in a poem.

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The most important things about voice, for me, are simply knowing that it is there, always, and that I can deploy voice(s) for artistic purposes.  

Voice, tone, movement and meaning (12.7.19)

Voice is the most intimate tool in your poetry writing (and reading) kit.  It makes nuance possible, and the more adept you become in using this tool, the more attuned your ear becomes to its possibilities, the greater depth AND INTEREST your poems will achieve.

We've talked about voice in poetry often, but usually obliquely, as we did with the project "Reading poems aloud" (11.21.18), and possibly even with the project on "Parody" (9.5.18).  And when we talk about irony in a poem during our Wednesday salon, we in some fashion talk about voice, that is, how the voice of the poem cannot be taken necessarily as the writer's own, or that the writer intentionally and more or less obviously dons a mask, a certain tone.

In the blog entry for October 20, 2019 ("Resisting the authorial voice in a poem"), I started thinking about voice and how it is deployed, whether it is used consciously and artistically.  This entry continues that idea.  (I am also expanding on the relationship between voice and intention in a new blog entry, not yet posted.

In the meantime, here is the project for this coming week's salon:

Write, research or dig from your sewing basket of old threads and poems one or two examples of voice in the high, medium, or low register.  The examples I gave at this past week's Wednesdays@One salon suggested the differences among these three registers:

• Voice in a lower register: "I learned street lingo from my old man."
• Voice in a middle register: "My father taught me slang."
• Voice in a high register: "It was my sire who educated me in the ways of colloquial English."

Granted, that last example is a pretty exaggerated piece of voicing, but you get the idea.  The late poet, Tony Hoagland, co-wrote a book on voice that was published posthumously (The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice.  With Kay Cosgrove.  Norton 2019), and just in time for our project.  He describes these three registers this way:

• We had lunch at the 4th Street Diner.               (Middle)
• We took our midday repast at Chez Panisse.   (High)
• We pigged out at Burger King.                        (Low)

                                                                                                    (P. 55)

On the face of it, the categories are arbitrary, and Hoagland acknowledges this.  Not every segment of inflected language (Hoagland's more hifalutin voicing for "register") fits neatly into one or the other of them.  Consider the following . . .

• We dined twelvish at the 4th Street Diner.
• We had lunch at Chez Panisse.
• We had our midday repast at Burger King.

Low to Middle to High represents a continuum of voice registers.  We can say that in many poems, the voice trends high, low, or middle.  Voice in the middle register appears uninflected (read: no agenda), informational only, and is therefore the voice of choice for the front page of many newspapers.  Voice in the high register is meant to sound authoritative.  Much academic writing, especially in the humanities, is delivered in the higher registers, as is much business writing, pronouncements from the Federal Reserve Chair; and you can be sure the soon-to-be published Articles of Impeachment will be couched in the highest register of voice possible.  Voice in the lower register wants to be familiar, friendly, current, common.

But we all know (I hope), that there is no such thing as the uninflected, uninvolved voice.  We know that the mere sound of authority is not authority.  And we know that familiar, friendly, current and common can be anything but.  That is to say, we know from wide experience that voice is put on--sometimes "a put-on"--for the occasion.  The trick in poetry is to put on a voice or voices meaningfully, strategically, with the agenda demanded by the poem.  The more aware you become of voice, its varieties and uses, the better you'll be at developing voice in your own writing.

But what is voice, exactly?  Hoagland calls it "the distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual speaker." (3)  He goes on to say that voice can be "the mysterious atmosphere that makes [a poem] memorable." (3)  For me, voice is pure intimacy.  It is the sounds that virtually sit in my ear as I read or listen, that penetrate my being through the ear in ways that the eye can't accommodate.  Voice binds me to a poem in ways that a poem's page real estate or visual imagery or theme or content cannot.  Hoagland explains . . .

"Voice can be more primary than any story or idea the poem contains, and voice carries the cargo forward to delivery.  When we hear a distinctive voice in a poem, our full attention is aroused and engaged, because we suspect that here, now, at last, we may learn how someone else does it--that is, how they live, breathe, think, feel, and talk." (3)

Here . . . now . . . at last.  Hoagland has in mind the immediacy of voice.  It's fair to note, along with Hoagland, that voices in the higher and lower registers tend to call attention to themselves, to the materiality of words, whereas voices in the middle register tend to stay in the background, uninvolved and apparently uninflected.  But to the attentive reader of poetry, all voices are inflected and all have an immediacy; all are chosen.

In a poem, voice is performance.  Even when I think that I, Clark, am speaking in one of my poems, I am giving a performance.  Whether it's a command virtuoso performance or a bit of schtick or slapstick, whether I am speaking directly of some fact, or whether I am sharing some personal experience or conclusion, I am on a stage, as it were, the stage of the work of art.  If I am not doing so, then I am not writing a poem, or a not very good poem.  Language is a medium and its meaning is always mediated in a poem; even a cri de Coeur is performative, a matter of register.

We often confuse the voice in a middle register with directness, "honesty" and "authenticity."  Here's an example.

Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable

Solid standing and readiness to wait,

These I learned from.

                                          -- Seamus Heaney, District and Circle

The read is so easy in these lines (yes, and through the entire poem which they begin) that you're left to believe that the MAN is speaking, not the poet.  But do you think Heaney spoke this way at the grocery checkout line?  No, this is performative Heaney, Heaney the Poet.  He broke the first line at the word "knowledgeable" and neglected the comma you'd think would be correct between it and "Solid" in the next line.  He didn't describe the cattle as simply standing and waiting, but as having a "readiness to wait," in a kind of internal self-contradiction (usually, we are ready to act) that should remind you of Milton's famous highbrow assertion: "They also serve who only stand and wait."  Not to mention the grammatically faulty run-on of "These I learned from," which might have been delivered in a more middle voice, "I learned from these."  These were all choices made during the construction of this poem, choices of voice and tonality.  They are meant to draw you in, to get you to identify.

So there is a good deal more complexity, layered-ness, and modulation to what at first seems a very "clear" and unencumbered voice in the middle register.  Choices have been made.  And if you are wondering at this point whether there is such a thing as a "normal" voice in a middle register, from which all other voices depart in some way, you'd be correct to acknowledge that, no, there is not.  It's all modulation.  

For contrast to the Heaney lines, look at these lines from another contemporary Irish poet, Paul Muldoon . . .

Not Sato's sword, not Sato's "consecrated blade"

that for all its years in the oubliette

of Thoor Ballylee, is unsullied, keen,

lapped yet in the lap of a geisha's gown.

This is the opening stanza to a sonnet titled "The Point" (in Muldoon's 1998 Hay).  (The lines from Heaney open a sonnet, too.)  You don't need the side-by-side comparison to see the difference in voice register.  These lines are in a modern voice's highest register, approaching what Modernist scholars used to call a poem's "difficulty."  The first stanza is one sentence, that is, encompassing a single thought.  The sentence structure is periodic; in other words, the main thought is withheld until the latter portion of the statement.  The sentence opens on a classical negative not hard to find in English-language poetry: "Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck"; "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments"; "Not at the first sight, nor with a dribbed shot"; "Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes."  (Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Swinburne.)  The periodic structure is in itself an indicator of a formal voicing.  The allusions are semi-classical and mythical, and certainly literary (Yeats--Sato's sword; Yeats owned and lived in Ballylee Castle).  All of which is to say, this is heightened language delivered in the highest of high registers, for which Muldoon is well-known.

You can mix voices in a poem, just as you mix voices in conversation.  In fact, as Hoagland argues, this mixing is one of the characteristics of contemporary American poetry.  It is poetry in the vernacular, where a poem's speaker modulates from one register to another without warning and, apparently, without plan or purpose.  I argue that in a well-crafted poem, there is always a plan and a purpose.  These may emerge through the writing process and subsequent drafting.  It may become apparent to you as you draft a poem that you are working in a particular voice register or set of registers.

With practice (writing and reading attentively), you may even learn to recognize nuances beyond (inside?) the grosser inflections of irony, anger, sarcasm, shrillness, joy, earnestness, resolve, hope, and so on.  Doing so will only broaden your palette of voices with which to paint the mood and movement of a poem.

You may also learn how to deploy various voices to various effects, such as the voice of an unself-reflective speaker.  You might learn how to put the voice of love into the words of a liar, or an earnest tone into the words of a grifter, irony into the voice of a believer, etc.

These will be challenging but rewarding problems to solve when you're writing a poem.

Some conclusions about voice:

• Voice in a poem is performative, and both the writer and the reader are implicated in the performance.
• Voice is a tool, part of the writer's general kit for creating emotion, mood, movement in a poem.
• Voice establishes a relationship between the poem and the reading of it; its possibilities are anything from colloquial to formal, rough to ornate, rude to gracious, soothing to shrill, local to universal, intimate to ironic, loving to accusatory, etc., etc.
• Voice is never neutral, even when it seems to be reportorial or "merely" descriptive.  It is (or should be) there by design, and it is meant to move the reader toward meaning or feeling.
• Voice occupies a register ranging from the familiar and colloquial to the high-minded and hifalutin.  Categories like "familiar," "neutral," and "high-toned" are not arbitrary but neither are they absolute; these voice registers are defined by the community within which the poet writes.  (The poet might write against the grain of that community.)

See you on Wednesday!