[Mark Allinson]

Buoyed Home

The rolling swell
tolls a sinners' bell
that manifests a shoal.

Green and red
flashing far ahead
will guide me to my goal.

I hope to glide
ghosting with the tide
and moor behind the mole.

A nodding nun
wards my shoreward run
but cannot shrive my soul.


=========

Well, who is this?

Absolutely no prizes will be awarded for a correct answer.

It's too easy, because the voice is unique to Timothy Murphy. Some skilled ventriloquist might write a close approximation, but before long the act would falter, I am sure.

Read through a collection of Tim's work, and before you are done you will have this distinctive voice firm and clear in your mind, and be able to recognise it in the future.

After writing a few comments on "voice" on Tim's sonnet thread on "Lariat" the other day, I thought this might make an interesting discussion topic. Perhaps it better belongs on the "Mastery" thread, and if deemed so, it may be moved there.

I wanted to lead into the discussion with some more examples from Tim, since he is one of our own unique voices on the 'Sphere, and in fact no one around these parts is "more unique" than our Tim. Here is another of my favourites.

Mortal Stakes

Partridge flee to the headland straw
when combines take their final lap.
A vixen leaves a severed paw
to free her foreleg from a trap.

The kildeer, feigning a fractured wing,
would lure me past the gravel flat
where spotted chicks are cowering
as though I were some feral cat.

No strategy of fight or flight
liberates me from instinct's grip.
I crave the whisky's amber light,
the balm of ice against my lip.

Salmon swimming toward a tarn
fatten a grizzly in the foam.
Racing into its flaming barn,
the white-eyed mare is headed home.

============

There is a distinctive tautness and a precision and a rhythmic felicity here which utterly defeats my attempts to re-create the effect. It can't be done, because this style is as individual as a thumb print.

There is also a lapidary effect in Tim's poetry, the like of which I haven't encountered. Words seem to interlock perfectly, like those ancient dry-stone walls you see in Europe, held together for centuries without the aid of any cement - the stones (words) being so perfectly chosen, they naturally nestle together and lock. Listen to this:

Homecoming

I found fierce dogs
guarding my pens
and fattened hogs
behind each fence.
Six hundred sows
fed the swine
who thronged my house
and swilled my wine.

I found a son
too green to draw
my bow of yew,
a queen who saw
her work undone,
her scullions too.
For this I quit
Circe's arms -
a manumit
to stinking farms?

A seer I trust
told me in Hell
how I could quell
my wanderlust:
"Go seek a man
so far inland
from Poseidon's shore
he'll think the oar
you bear in hand
a winnowing fan."

=========

Not only do I love this for its wonderfully pithy Homeric subject matter, but for the rhythms and the sound. The quality of ear this man possesses is phenomenal, and it obviously played a large part in his attainment of a unique voice.

So, who are the voices you hear in poetry (past or present) that you feel you could recognise anywhere?

And what are the factors behind the production of a recognisable voice in poetry?

Can it be produced through training?

How do you get one?

(I am writing a letter to Father Christmas).

------------------
Mark Allinson

[winter]

Mark

This isn't an answer to your question, but Al Alvarez has just published a book called The Writer's Voice , in which he analyses Plath, Shakespeare, Eliot, Donne, Yeats, and Coleridge amongst others to find out what constitutes their unique voices.

I just started it yesterday and so can't vouch for sure as to how worthwhile it is, but I've enjoyed the first few pages.

From the first page - "Young writers hoping to cut a figure on the scene often confuse voice with stylishness, but that is something quite different from a voice with the weight of a life, however young, behind it, the one Jane Kramer calls, 'the voice that you can't quite hear...that, with any luck, will eventually start to sound like you.'"

Rob

[Janet Kenny]

While agreeing that many of the finest poets do have an immediately recognisable voice I think another type of poet has the right different voice for the poem, rather than a voice we recognise first as the voice of the poet.

Familiarity with a poet will enable us to recognise a personal voice as well but it is not inevitably the first virtue.

After all, William McGonagall had a recognisable voice.
William McGonagall

Janet

[Mark Allinson]

Rob,

no, I don't know that work. Let us know if you find something else of interest in it.

That is an important point you make about the "weight of life", or vision, you might call it, and one forgot to mention with regard to Tim's work, which is filled with images and thoughts about the land he lives in, and the struggle of its inhabitants and its creatures.

Especially the creatures - Tim's work is rich in animals, and he captures their behaviour so well, often making silent commentary on the great and fundamental issues of life as he talks about animals and environments. This is another element of voice, the feeling for the issues in the poems.

Janet,

you have a voice, for a start. And quite a distinctive voice, I would say. I bet I could pick one of your poems from a crowd. And not only from metrical style and inclination, but from the "vision" in your subject matter.

But then again, when I think on it, you are also capable of writing things I might not be able to pick.

That's an interesting point about McGonagall, and one I have made myself. His "voice" is hard to miss, certainly, but I feel few would be inclined to emulate it.


------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited July 06, 2005).]

[Tim Murphy]

This is a subject of considerable interest to me. My notion of voice is a combination of matter and method. Some writers have it in spades, and others don't. For instance, I don't think Coleridge has a particularly distinctive voice. Coming to him cold, I don't think I'd guess that Frost at Midnight, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan were written by one man. Among the best poets of our times Wilbur and Hecht have absolutely distinctive voices, but I don't think you'd say that of Donald Justice.

Looking at younger poets, Williamson's voice is absolutely distinctive. I think it proceeds from his youth in Nashville and his way of looking at the world. The accent is honey and magnolia, and he brings a wry wit to the service of high seriousness. Much the same can be said of Sam Gwynn, although his verse is far more sardonic than Greg's, and you'd never mistake one for the other. I'd also note that each "found" his voice in his early twenties. In Sam's first book there's one poem that sounds like Auden, but everything else is distinctively Gwynn.

That wasn't the case with me. Until I was 32 I sounded like someone other than Murphy. It is hard to believe that the Early Poems section of my first book is written by the hunter and farmer and sailor I later became.

Looking round the Sphere, we have some very distinctive voices. Whether the poem is funny or serious, one simply cannot mistake Hayes. There is an informal, anecdotal Irishness to his formal speech which is unmistakable. John Beaton's is another highly distinctive voice. In his case too it is a matter of a marriage of matter and method. Poems about the Highlands, the Pacific Northwest, fishing, all told with a great sort of rolling sonority that is distinctly his.

"Ah, Mister Man of Snow,
With your well-versed, wintry mind
And icy, bitumen stare,
You're making your cameo
In a high, supercilious hat
With the unperturbable air
Of the coolest aristocrat
In all of Snowmankind."

There's Williamson in his early twenties. Now contrast that to the "cave guy grilling mammoth steaks" over at the Fire thread on Lariat. The voice is astonishingly consistent over two decades.

[Mark Allinson]

That is interesting, Tim, that your voice took so long to arrive. It would be interesting to hear what you sounded like before the real Tim stood up. But perhaps you would rather not.

What factors would you say contributed most to the clarifying of your voice?

------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited July 06, 2005).]

[Tim Murphy]

Mark, in my twenties I sounded rather regretably like Yeats:

Ganymede and the Eagle

A sudden blow, and outstretched talons clasp
the struggling boy, pinning him to the rock
from which he piped to his indifferent flock.
Helpless, he wriggles in the raptor's grasp
while his rapacious captor strips its prize,
tearing his flimsy chiton with its beak.
Now bearing him to the Olympic peak,
the eagle screams its triumph to the skies
but does not let its naked victim drop.
Zeus has assumed the likeness of a bird
to save this shepherd from the common herd.
Filling his cup when the Immortals sup,
kissing the Father of the Gods to sleep,
how could he miss the maidens or the sheep?

Writing this parody helped me get over it! The adult voice coincided with the acquisition of the first farm and with my first letters from Wilbur, who accused me of "insufficient charge" in the language of my predominant pentameters.

I should mention that a good argument can be made that Hecht came late to the severity of voice that characterized his later books. In Hard Hours, published when he was forty, he is almost a ventriloquist, with poems sounding like Stevens, Auden, Eliot and Yeats all side by side with poems that prefigure the later work.

Wilbur's very different. Although the playful, baroque vocabulary of his youth is now rarely to be found, that's a matter of a voice simply changing and maturing. A couple of years ago somebody put up a new Wilbur poem I'd not seen at Mastery and asked whose is it. After three lines I knew the answer. Of course it was written in aba haiku stanza, which made it a cinch, but I think I'd find it just as easy to recognize his pentameters.

[Tim Love]

Some people flounder around trying lots of things out, happen to get some success with a particular style and stick to it. They have "found their voice" - a subject and style that suits them - though sometimes the success is outward/commercial rather than inward/artistic. Any success is to be welcomed, but maybe there are other, even better voices out there waiting to be discovered. And what happens to the old poems? Sometimes (Wendy Cope?!) it's as if they're disowned. Other times, a poet's posthumous Collected reveals that even after they "found their voice" they were writing in other voices too, maybe using other names. The down-side of "finding one's voice" is that readers might interpret the poet's future development as "losing one's voice". One might expect "voice" to change as the poet's personality does. Once one becomes a twentysomething perhaps personality-changes slow down sufficiently for others to hear a stable ("mature") voice.

[Roger Slater]

Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?

Shakespeare went on to offer a disingenuos answer to his own question, but his sonnet would have failed had he simply said that accomplished writers have a voice all their own.

I think "voice" is a natural byproduct of the fact that poets are individuals. Just as we recognize our friends' voices on the telephone, or can recognize their handwriting at a glance without reading a word, we can recognize the way they go about expressng themselves in verse, provided, however, that they have developed enough skill and ease with their craft to permit their private selves to show through in their public poems. The old cliche about going off to "find yourself" is true in poetry. A poet needs to find himself, which is not as simple as it sounds. It involves ridding oneself of self consciousness, paradoxically, and not unconsciously adopting the disguises of cliche or imitation or posturing. Since art is artifice, the marriage of artifice with the genuine, non-artificial core of individuality to produce something distinctive, yet somehow generic and ultimately artificial, gives rise to the alchemy that is art's ultimate appeal. With luck and skill, perhaps we can all complain, along with the Bard, that our verse is barren of new pride.

[Tim Murphy]

Tim, I think you're right about one's flailing around, finding a schtick that works, then sticking to it. And the remarks about voice being a function of the life one pursues or falls into are spot on. If you're going to write about farming or hunting, you're not likely to employ a romance language-derived vocabulary.

One excellent poet among us who doesn't have a distinctive voice is Alan Sullivan. That is partly because he has such a gift for mimesis. And the voice he most uncannily imitates is mine. I was just stuck with a mediocre, impenetrable, deep imagey poem in Mortal Stakes which Mark quotes above. It was a 12 liner, and then Alan grew it to 16 by composing lines 7-12. And who can tell the difference?