In the creative writing workshops of colleges and universities around the country, young writers and poets are often encouraged to “find” their voices. The small press community, which publishes most of the contemporary poetry written these days, also seeks writers who have found their voices. In my copy of the 2006 edition of Poet’s Market, I find these comments from various editors:
- Be true to your own voice and style.
- We seek poetry written in a strong, mature voice.
- These writers found their own voice and were not afraid to go against the grain.
- We look for a strong voice.
- [We do] not want generic voices.
- We are looking for work indicative of rare and unique talent – and original voices.
- Find your own voice and techniques.
From time to time I have wondered if all the talk about finding one’s voice is not perhaps a bit of claptrap and academic hooey. What precisely does the injunction mean? Is the young poet a mute and abandoned waif that must find a way back home where his or her voice waits like a forlorn parent?
If we try to define terms we quickly mire in ambiguity. What is meant by one’s voice? Is it the particular timbre and tonic range of a person’s speech, its brogue or twang? Or rather is it the pattern and movement of one’s consciousness when verbalized into thought? Or is the idea of finding voice simply a synonym for style, as in a “poetic” or a “rhetorical” manner?
In one sense, just about every writer has a voice already, and has had one since infancy when wailing for a mother’s milk. The poet need not search for and find that voice as if it were a misplaced nickel. The physical sound of that voice surfaces early in life and finally settles by the end of puberty, with the possibility of aging still into time like a slow cider. Or if the voice has some particular quirk, like a drawl, stutter, or lisp, or a regional stamp, or a streak of cockney, that quality also is nothing that requires a posse or a search team. Or if by voice a pattern of thought is meant, that pattern also is something every person possesses naturally and uniquely. Again, it is not lost or missing. Frankly, it seems to me that this whole topic is sometimes complicated by an academic need to make simple things difficult, as though the requirement to find a voice were designed to keep a novice at safe distance from the expert.
In truth, every writer already has a voice just as plain, or perhaps as indecipherable, as his handwriting. The scribbles of voice and hand alike have their own peculiar signature, and each voice is as different from another as two leaves on a tree or two stones in a river bed.
Perhaps we might do better if we shed the idea of “finding a voice” and instead talk about the idea of “developing a voice,” the way a singer might, or an actor. This introduces the notion of progression, a progression that is earned by time, effort and experience, by simple trial and error.
Training and discipline are required simply to hold with the experiment, to stick with the labor of measuring over and over the weight of images, diction, rhythms of speech, modulation of vowels, pacing and movement. The idea of development also introduces the notion of play, of the ongoing search for a variety of aesthetic pleasures, as many as the spirit might have capacity to absorb.I suppose the idea of development also introduces the notion of “skill” — of developed talent — but I wonder if this notion, too, does not ultimately mislead. What the poet William Stafford wrote on this point I appreciate a great deal:
This attitude toward the process of writing creatively suggests a problem for me, in terms of what others say. They talk about “skills” in writing. Without denying that I do have experience, wide reading, automatic orthodoxies and maneuvers of various kinds, I still must insist that I am often baffled about what “skill” has to do with the precious little area of confusion when I do not know what I am going to say and then I find out what I am going to say. That precious interval I am unable to bridge by skill. What can I witness about it? It remains mysterious, just as all of us must feel puzzled about how we are so inventive as to be able to talk along through complexities with our friends, not needing to plan what we are going to say, but never stalled for long in our confident forward progress. Skill? If so, it is the skill we all have, something we must have learned before the age of three or four.
A writer is one who has become accustomed to trusting that grace, or luck, or — skill. William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl, University of Michigan Press, 1978, p. 19.
After a certain length of development, a poet might earn the title of “good.” Inevitably, judgments are made one way or another. But I also wonder if what we mean by the good poet is simply one who has insisted on, and persisted in, the singularity of his or her own notions — the poet who has recognized that one’s viewpoint was always unique and original to begin with and undertook the greatest pains to safeguard it, and not merely mimic another’s perspective. Perhaps this is what the professor and the editor mean by finding one’s voice — to resist the temptation to ape the notions of other more established writers.
The truly good poets of this world all share the quality of a distinct signature, an unmistakable quality of personal originality, so much that they are recognizable in virtually any line of their poetry, as if their whole lives had seeped into the combinations of each word. Consider the following samples. Even if a reader cannot identify the authors of these lines, still the styles are so markedly different that there is no mistaking a unique and original style in each passage:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress ...
*****
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
*****
None who saw it ever told it
‘Tis as hid as Death
Had for that specific treasure
A departing breath —
Surfaces may be invested
Did the Diamond grow
General as the Dandelion
Would you serve it so?
*****
Where hast thou hidden thy Emanation lovely Jerusalem
From the vision and fruition of the Holy-one?
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! We are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!
Ye are my members O ye sleepers of Beulah, land of shades!
*****
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
The reader with even a modest range of experience will probably recognize these passages from Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, Blake and Shakespeare. The writer may benefit by comparing. The varieties of style stem from more than a few tricks of punctuation or capitalization. We might say the Yeats passage is limpid, or that the Whitman passage is declamatory. Or that the Dickinson passage, which is an entire poem, is so contorted that it seems the invention of a wholly new English grammar generated by the run-on sentence.
However, as I reread these passages, I am impressed not such much by these qualities, which might be deemed qualities of voice, as I am by perspective. Each of these poets was absolutely compelled by singular notions. Which calls to mind the observation of Ezra Pound (from his ABC of Reading I believe) that the poet who has something to say will find a way of saying it. I have long believed that to make a joyful sound, almost any clump of vowels and consonants will serve. The joy is found in the poet’s spirit, which will cry out naturally with its own signature voice, even if that spirit were otherwise cased in stone.