Citation

Hoagland, Tony. The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Quotes

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Collations

Voice

voice, the distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual speaker.

In many poems voice is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it memorable, that holds it together and aloft like the womb around an embryo.

A strong poetic voice is connective

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.

a strong poetic voice is connective, binding the speaker and the reader into a conversation compelling enough to be called a relationship.

A SUCCESSFUL POEM IS VOICED INTO A LIVING AND compelling presence. This convincing representation of a speaker may be created by force, or intellectual subtlety, or companionability, or even by eccentricity, but it must initiate a bond of trust that incites further listening. That presence in voice is not always “intimate” in a warm, “best friend” kind of way, but the reader must be impressed that the speaker is a complex, interesting individual who is intriguingly committed to what she is saying, and how she is saying it.

the reader-narrator encounter is itself a real-time contract-in-the-making, one in which the narrator asks trust of a dubious listener, then has to prove herself worthy of such trust.

That’s what a voice poet wants to do: hook us and then escort us deep into the interior of the poem, which is also the interior of the poet, which is also the interior of the world.

A strong poetic voice binds the human with the world

In its vital connectivity, it is capable of including both the manifold world and the rich slipperiness of human nature.

Voice is the medium of story and theme

If a poem is to some degree about “story” or “theme,” then the medium that delivers that information is the dimension of voice.

Voice embodies the presence of a self

voice embodies, not any set of particular facts, but the presence of a self, a personality or a sensibility. Maybe a complex poetic voice even communicates the history of how that sensibility developed.

Pre-1900s English poetic voice

In pre-1900s English poetry, the poetic voice tended to be rhetorically lofty, authoritative, wisdom-dispensing, and high-minded.

Contemporary poetry's voice

Contemporary poetry, and the poetry of twentieth-century America, shifted the footing of much poetry to the conversational and the highly mobile speech register of one ordinary person speaking confidentially to another.

What do we want from a contemporary poetic voice? One good answer to that question is that we want to feel that we are encountering a speaker “in person,” a speaker who presents a convincingly complex version of the world and of human nature. When we commence reading a poem, we are starting a relationship, and we want that relationship to be with an interesting, resourceful companion.

Poetic voice relies on distinct skills

A WRITER’S ABILITY TO PROJECT A VOICE ON THE PAGE is the product of many distinct verbal skills, acquired from myriad sources and practiced a great deal. Good writing is built on a kind of athletic virtuosity, the assemblage and combination of different muscular movements, like those of a good dancer.

A good poem is likewise a performance that emerges from a set of precisely coordinated and much-rehearsed skills.

Show how the mind changes in a poem

One way to make a convincing poetic voice is to display the mind in motion, or the mind changing direction as it speaks.

We like to say “I changed my mind,” but the human mind alters its direction so rapidly and constantly, we might as well say “My mind changed me.”

When we can see a speaker changing his or her mind while actually in the middle of speech, it catches our interest.

the humanity of the speaker’s voice is created and revealed through the record of its transformations.

the instability of our own ongoingly changing selves, and our affection and respect are earned by the speaker’s persistence.

Ways to show mind changes in a poem

In a poem, this changing movement can be represented in many ways. It can be embodied through a kind of stuttering hesitation, or by a spontaneous uncensoredness, or as a deepening tangle of psychology. It can be performed as anxiety, or carefree light-headedness, or as overconfident swagger, or as steady, painstaking thoughtfulness.

the act of poetic self-revising can also happen at a slower, more measured velocity.

Show process rather than product in a poem

The goal of the poem is not to conceal uncertainty and to deliver an airtight argument, or proclamation, or insight, not to arrive at some truth, but rather to display the nature of the speaker’s “real-time” sensibility, including its tendency toward indecisiveness and self-contradiction.

one feature of “voice” poems is a love of process, not the neatened perfection of product.

A good poem escalates in stakes

This escalation in stakes could be said to be characteristic of serious poetry: a good poem intensifies, increases, and then resolves tension.

A poem's connective power is rarely achieve by brevity

Such presence is only sometimes created by brevity.

Many gurus on the craft of writing declare that a writer should “make every word count.” Yet in poetry, often the charm of voice is more important than economy. After all, most of our daily interchanges don’t convey information in an economical manner.

Inefficient speech additions to poetry humanize it and make it relational

All day, every day, those “uhs” and “ers” and “likes” pepper and salt our spoken interchanges. These “inefficiencies” of speech serve a purpose in building tone and voice; they “warm” and humanize poetic speech; and they have their own prosodic contribution to make to poems.

These interruptives, asides, idioms, rhetorical questions, declaratives, etc., float through our sentences like packing material, which in a sense they are—they pack and cushion and modulate the so-called “contents” of our communications. And this technically “inessential language” creates an atmosphere of connectedness, of relationality.

To use these gestures in poetic writing is to make the poem more oral, you could say, than literary; more spoken than written. Such spoken colloquial additives are one key to a poetic voice that connects

The specific lexicon of such speech additives and asides may change from decade to decade or according to region, class, and generation, but our daily speech is crowded with them, and they are an important element in creating the atmosphere of much contemporary poetry.

we are attracted by such familiar flavors of speech, the way that bees are attracted to the blue juice of a melting popsicle.

These asides and insertions have more to do with the connection between speaker and reader than the narrative.

A strong poetic voice could initiate connection without being friendly

Poetic intimacy means confiding, but the speaker we find ourselves in relationship with is not always conventionally nice or friendly.

A strong poetic voice could be plainspoken

fosters intimacy in another way too: the quick revelation of plainspoken self-knowledge.

Lewis’s plain linguistic style might be described as “prosaic,” that is, verbose and unpoetic, yet it compels us because her speaker tells more truth than we usually get, and she does so with a bluntness that tests the conventions of decorum.

Lewis is a narrative-discursive poet in style, not a poet of lyrical language, but there is a rhythmic, businesslike terseness in her storytelling and thinking that is riveting in its purposeful informality. Her speaker captivates us for the duration of whatever she wants to say.

We want a poem with a strong voice because it is divergent

In a world where, socially, we often feel stranded on the surface of appearances, people go to poems for the fierce, uncensored candor they provide, the complex, unflattering, often ambivalent way they stare into the middle of things.

In a world where, as one poet says, “people speak to each other mostly for profit,” it is exhilarating to listen to a voice that is practicing disclosure without seeking advantage. That is intimate.

(Continue with Chapter III)

Unsorted

O’Hara famously said that a poem was something one wrote instead of making a phone call to a friend, and his poems are indeed as conversational and friendly as phone calls.

it is the voice we are listening to, not the story, really.

you can feel the physical rhythm of the speaker’s breath; the poem is breathing.

Literature notes

Prompts