Comments on: Voice shmoice

By: Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 00:50:00 +0000

Where does the idea of poetic channeling come from? Blame Yeats. Before him, Coleridge. And way before him, the shamans. Chinese poetry has its original shamanic poem called “Li Sao,” or “The Lament,” with a speaker that flies through the heavens. I’ve no idea what he was on.

Jee

By: gabrielwestling

gabrielwestling — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 16:50:00 +0000

I think Rob brings up an interesting point. An author who is difficult to pin down is difficult to market. The obvious recourse is to market the fact that you can’t pin the author down, but that novelty doesn’t have much legs on it.

I would be curious to see what peoples’ opinions are about whether or not the authorship cult of personality plays into it?

By: Rob Mackenzie

Rob Mackenzie — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 23:33:00 +0000

These days, I think it may be a useful marketing tool.
If a poet can be identified with a certain voice, and all his/her poems conform to the voice, then the poet is easier to sell and market. That’s why ambitious poets are urged to find their voice. And that’s why voice is in and variety is out (that last sentence is a paraphrase of something Ros Barber said).

By: Julie Carter

Julie Carter — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:59:00 +0000

I’m definitely a 2. To me, voice is simply the poet’s wordy thumbprint. Some prints are blurry, or overlaid. Some are very sharp. They are all formed of genetic predisposition plus experience.

Thumbs, yo.

By: gabrielwestling

gabrielwestling — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:35:00 +0000

Weeeell, it didn't start there but the idea of voice as some undercurrent of the great beyond got a lot of momentum from the Romantics.

Yeats, who paradoxically was quite a dedicated reviser of his own work, was also very much convinced of the notion of channeling forces above or beyond human understanding.

In a lot of poetic theory you run across words that are capitalized for ideological reasons. Even Poetry gets the big P sometimes, because it is supposed to be a privileged subject.

But, to stick closer to your original question – I think there are two ways to interpret the infamous “find your voice” statement.

1. A poet’s voice is something that exists despite (and possibly before) the poet. The “find your voice” in this sense is to tap into something that is not under the poet’s control to create. The poet then is a vessel for the X, let’s call X inspiration. So, on the one hand, you could say that the poet is like a spigot, through which inspiration flows. Most proponents of this interpretation would rather say something like: inspiration is the breath, and the poet is the musician who uses the breath to create the music. It amounts to the more or less the same thing.

Some folk also come at this from the impression that the inspired voice is the perfect thing, and whatever the poet does with it is a more or less poor copy of the thing. The poet’s job in this scenario is to get as close to a perfect copy of the thing as possible.

2. A poet’s voice is the cumulative effect of her various influences, experiences, style choices, and so on. Nuts and bolts, a poet’s voice is total effect that allows a reader to identify a particular author by the manner in which the poem is constructed.

It is my own opinion that there is far more interpenetration of each theory into the other than might seem reasonable at first.