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:
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 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.
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!
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