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

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

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

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).]

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.

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).]

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.

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.

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, 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?

Call me a skeptic when it comes to immediately recognizable "voice" in a poem. I suspect that, as with blind taste tests of colas, people think they know what they are sampling and are very often wrong. Some of what we recognize as a poet's voice is really his or her usual subject matter. Very few poets have a style that is so distinctive (often because they have invented it, like Ogden Nash or e.e. cummings) that one can readily tell who is writing. Good poets often have more than one string to their bow and can fool people who aren't thinking of their full range.

I am not denying that most good poets develop a voice that is strong and characteristic. One brings everything one is and knows to writing poetry, and many things that are beyond one's conscious awareness, too. In fact, I think that it is partly the ability to let the unconscious speak for the writer that brings out the writer's truest voice. Someone like Shakespeare can speak in so many voices that we have to remind ourselves that he was just one person. So I think voice is a fascinating issue, but one that can't be boiled down to any simple rules or guidelines.

Susan

Tim,

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?

Believe me, I certainly noted it because it is notable, but I still thought it was you.

Susan,

Your post seems to contradict itself, but at the end you say, "So I think voice is a fascinating issue, but one that can't be boiled down to any simple rules or guidelines."----I don't think anyone is trying to boil anything down to to simple rules or guidelines.

I think poets (and in other art forms) should and do struggle to make their own style, something identifiable, which is in process bringing out their own voice. I think this element of style often matches where the individual is in their development of who they are, and what they want to do in life, and what kind of person they want to be, which may be bringing out the person, their inner voice there all along.

I just want to note that in the thread I started on general with the four different poets writing in the same unidentifiable style, this thread subsequently picks up on the same idea, but is staying on track much better.

TJ

Susan has an excellent point on Shakespeare, many voices. So many in fact, that when I first read Marlowe I thought he was Shakespeare. Except that Kit is way more gay than Will. And some of the songs from the plays sound an awful lot like Campion and Jonson. That's of course partly attributable to his being the greatest dramatic poet. I think there is an undifferentiation in Elizabethan verse that ends shortly thereafter. For instance, and this is Mark's field, who could mistake Herbert for Donne?

TJ, that was a brilliant pastiche of boring crap you assembled. The chasing of voice in creative writing schools is scandalous. I mean, get a life, develop passionate interests, then write what you know with minute attention to its close observation. When you read a Wilbur plant poem, you know it's Wilbur, because he knows plants as well as I know dogs or pheasants.

But Tim, I thought Marlowe WAS Shakespeare - after that brilliantly faked "death"... and all the others, weren't they Shakespeare too? Isn't THAT why Elizabethan poetry is undifferentiated?

KEB

Shakespeare, of course, could inhabit a character and create langauge and speeches that permitted very diverse types of people to become real in a deep way, from the inside out. But I still think that Shakespeare's voice as a poet/writer comes through whether it's Falstaff or Hamlet or Rosaline or Prospero who's speaking. It's the same with great actors. Dustin Hoffman serves up Willy Loman or the Graduate in a totally convincing manner, but we still know it's Dustin Hoffman.

A-hem! We still know it's ARTHUR MILLER.

Tim,

I don't think subject matter is sufficient to save any poem; doesn't the art and style save the subject matter?

Are you giving me the guideline to go out and "get a life?"
Thank you.

TJ

Oh, I think we do have recognizable voices in our work, but in general I don't think it's a good thing. I would not want every poem I ever wrote to be instantly recognizable as a Carol poem, because then every poem I ever wrote would be just like every other poem I ever wrote, and I would get sick of the sound of my own voice. But since I'm a cynical old bag with a twisted sense of humor (at war with the tattered remains of a naieve streak that insists there really is a tooth fairy), and since we can't disguise our handwriting even when we try, much of my poetry probably is going to be recognizable. I attempt to be true to the character or point of view (real or imagined) of the speaker and to vary the rhyme scheme, meter, style, and content from one poem to the next according to the effect I want. The problem is I have the same old ear and subjective taste to screen it all with.

Carol

But Carol, to say that we might recognize your voice is not to say that everything you write is the same. Is every Richard Wilbur poem the same? Is every Robert Frost poem the same? Yet they (in particular the latter) have voices that are quite recognizable. An individual voice can be deep and broad enough to allow for near infinite variety. Just as writing in form allows for variety, writing in the "form" of oneself should allow no less. It's all you have to work with, when push comes to shove. And it's fine. Like Whitman, you contain multitudes.

Once a voice is established and appreciated, it's an additional pleasure for the reader. ED's voice is obviously quite distinct, and I, like many people, are so enamoured of that voice that I derive pleasure even from her lesser poems. It's sort of like getting a letter from a friend. Even a few hastily written lines summon up the same person who might, on other occasions, write a longer and more thoughtful letter.

Well said, Roger,

And is it possible to begin to discern the character and personality of the person writing a poem through sounds, and hints of verbal constructions? I think so. Roger, you are so right, the voice in a poem can be like an old friend.

TJ

Where does versatility fit into this discussion (i.e., the ability to serve the material, to "disappear" into the voices of diverse narrators)?

Or does it at all?

In fiction, I'm far less interested in authors than books. In music, I find versatile peformers dull, and vastly prefer artists committed to a defined style or discipline. In film and theater, stars bore and chameleons thrill (on the other hand, I do pay attention to the body of work of directors).

But when it comes to poetry, honestly, I'm on the fence about the importance/desirability of voice.

So I'm stumped. And you?

Ethan:
In music, I find versatile peformers dull, and vastly prefer artists committed to a defined style or discipline. In film and theater, stars bore and chameleons thrill (on the other hand, I do pay attention to the body of work of directors).

When I was what they insist on describing as a "classical" singer I was deeply into versatility in what I thought was the best meaning of the word. All music has its own voice. I remember Benjamin Britten saying that all his vocal music was written for specific singers and I know that was true of Verdi and others. With new scores I never knew what sound I would make until the music showed me. I was nauseated by agents and teachers who viewed the voice as a "product". "If you don't have a recognisable sound they won't know how to cast you". Of course I had my own "voice" but I regarded it as a blank sheet of paper.

Writing is different in that one is also the composer but for me the principle remains. The voice comes with the poem. It's up to others to know whether the "voice" is characteristically mine.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 06, 2005).]

If you find versatile performers dull, then they're not truly versatile.

While there's nothing wrong with having a distinctive voice, I also don't see how there could be anything wrong with versatility. What's not to like? You don't hear people saying, "Oh, I don't have any respect for decathlon winners." Of course versatility doesn't mean flailing around trying different things with varying levels of success (i.e., what I do), it means rising to a variety of challenges. Sure, that makes it tougher on fans who have certain expectations when they buy your book, and on critics, who like being able to categorize poets as New Whatever-ists. But just because others find consistency reassuring doesn't mean the artist should embrace it.

Either that or I'm a dull listener.

I'm aware that on a certain level this kind of preference is really just an indefensible set of biases, subject to change over time.

And as to Janet's tales of woe, I do sometimes wonder if there's a bit too much of a "branding" aspect to voice in poetry as well. In that regard, the pros and cons seem to have roughly equal weight--readers might be more receptive to what you're conveying, but only if there's something in the telling that hearkens back to previous works.

But as I said before, I'm on the fence about this one. That's why the thread is interesting (my own posts excepted, of course).

I completely agree that it's nice to curl up with an old friend and know the "voice." Whether that be so idiosyncratic a lyricist as Father Hopkins, or a man of many voices like Browning.

I infinitely prefer a recognizable voice, and I am amazed that I ever developed that. Child that I was, I thought I would forever imitate my great predecessors. I couldn't foresee a life that ventured outside the bounds of the books I devoured.

I do fear that Tom's exercise with FV could be repeated in sonnet form. One can seize upon any number of sonnets in Bill Baer's new anthology, or any number that we see at Deep End, and they're damn near indistinguishable. (By the way, Tom, I meant the grad students should get a life.)

Close as they are in life experience, I would never confuse two ploughmen poets, Clare and Burns. Nor could I confuse Robinson and Frost. Or Francis and Murphy. I think that is as it should be, and if you are not writing in a recognizable voice, you have not found the ground you are able to defend.

For the second time this week ;) I agree with Janet. And I suspect that when people say the voice of an author, Frost, say, is always unmistakable, they do so with the benefit of knowledge.

Without googling, can anyone say how many authors are represented in the following ten extracts? Does anyone recognise an author’s voice right off?

a)
It’s a hard life for the farmer
ploughing the land in spring,
and a hard life for the poet
trying and trying to sing.

b)
We walked through the last of summer,
When shadows reached long and blue
Across days that were growing shorter:
You said: “There’s autumn too.”

c)
A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.

d)
What risk for you as you munch on a snack
while, somewhere below, a fish
opens his mouth to fate? Then back
he’s thrown, with a pious wish!

e)
Explosive passion and proportioned pain,
The randy woman and the scream machine:
I’d do it, have it all again —
Mad, bad, ironically named Irene!

f)
Each time a goose walks on my grave,
I fear the future less —
a new adventure for the brave,
at worst a nothingness.

g)
The world is too much painted. On we go:
fudging and gilding, we lay waste an era.
While sitcom Friends asked millions for a show,
millions starved. So why not join the con?
Bring me my smock, my gaudy paints! Bring on
the phony tinsel and the fake veneer!

h)
At fifteen, I would watch my brother,
three years older, masturbate with zest
our black cocker spaniel, Druid.
The dog — head motionless, with eye-whites rolling
and haunches humping — submitted silently
but his ejaculation when it came
was copious and forceful; he afterwards remained
as still as if bewitched or mesmerised.

i)
Why did you give me average looks, sub-average height,
a stammer, bandy legs, poor vision?
Am I supposed to thank you
because I wasn’t born disabled?
Well, what about those who were?
What have you got to say to them?
Wait, let me guess:
you visit the father’s sins upon the children,
even unto the third and fourth generation.
Bastard!

j)
Shall a Haitian scold eardrum or cochlea
or a conscious contraption breathe of mullions and arches
by a riverine minnow-streamed Chaparral airstrip,
as somewhere a chimpanzee
passes the Turing Test?

Henry,

I must admit, none of these voices proclaims its author immediately to my ear. But are the samples large enough?

Also, I have so little access to contemporary poetry (I can't afford it and the libraries won't order it) that I don't have an internalised model for many contemporary poets.

Do you intend to prove with this test that "voice" is an illusion?

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

No, Mark, I certainly don’t say voice is an illusion. But I agree with Janet that, while some poets settle into one voice, others may find different voices for different poems. Someone or other wrote that “every novel requires its own style” and I think that’s a similar idea.

Another possible analogy is with film actors. One type, let’s call him the Cary Grant model, basically goes through film after film playing essentially the same character. If the character is an interesting or charming one, that works fine, at the cost of narrowing the range of roles he can play. He gets better and better at “playing himself” — though that one screen persona might or might not correspond with the way he is when he’s not working. (Grant was said to be neurotic and unsure of himself, but Tom Hanks is said to be exactly the nice guy he usually plays.) The other type is the versatile actor who can “become” different characters as the scripts may require — an Olivier or a Brando. I know which I’d rather be. I consider poetry to be a kind of drama or fiction anyway.

I’m somewhat sceptical that voice is in all cases identifiable. For instance, you cite Tim’s trimeter, yet I remember a while back (perhaps when you were absent) he and Mike Moran played a trick at the Deep End — each posted a poem by the other. And there were no immediate cries of “That’s Tim!” on Mike’s thread. Of course some writers have a “signature” idiosyncrasy in their phrasing, but I think faced with a work by an undisclosed author most of us would get more clues from the content, the preoccupations, than from the phrasing or meter. Of course I may be wrong; perhaps you can reliably spot an author once you know his/her work inside-out. But again, I think this assumes that authors work in one vein only, whereas some work in many.

And Mark, I too buy little contemporary poetry. People like Heaney are certainly in the libraries (well, maybe not yours) but there’s plenty by a variety of writers available directly in front of you as you read this — on the Web. poemhunter.com is a good one, although some of the poems there have their line breaks munged.

Henry





[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited July 10, 2005).]

Henry, what are the answers?

We all sound like ourselves, but our selves change everyday, every minute even. I'd say most of us have a few states, a few related personalities we slip easily into because we know how, and a whole forest of other, less well defined or developed personalities, such as a particular mood we inhabit under a thunderstorm, or a slightly macho attitude we take on when critting poetry, as a random example http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/wink.gif .

I think people who write in many voices have realised on some level that as humans, our claim to having consistent and definable 'characters' is a bit of a fib we tell ourselves to make us feel secure and establish a social identity for ourselves. I think those many-voiced writers know that they can, with a little effort, create (or observe) a new personality for themselves and inhabit it for the purposes of writing; most artist do this to an extent, even confessional writers - perhaps the reason people get so annoyed with bad confessional writing is not that it is too personal, but rather that the author has fabricated a fictional, usually victim status character to vindicate him or herself, and it smacks of dishonesty.

For my part, I often muck around with stitching parts of my pals to each other and writing through my new Frankenstein's monster friend's eyes. I feel I also have a core voice, perhaps the closest to my soulvoice, if you don't mind me getting a bit kooky. I don't/can't always write in that one, though poems I do write this way tend to be more consistently successful with readers; other voices I use are my own personal constructed (contrived?) voices, (see above) and mangled bits of people I clone and nourish into new characters. Sometimes I make characters from scratch, but I tend to get more stylised representations this way (which often go down well, I think because the reader can find them in the poem, while real people often aren't easily captured on paper - I mean, look how hard it is with photographs, let alone words). A lot of my voices tend to be female, and I mainly read books and poetry by women, as well as listening most often to female singers: I think writing can be a good way to voice parts of yourself you can't always express in a semi-conformist society (not that I am much of a conformist within it, but everyone is to some extent... 'Is there individuality, or just varying shades of non-conformity?' went Natalie Merchant's lyrics).

Roger Slater, excellent post.

I like this thread, it's the best I've noticed for ages.

[This message has been edited by Alexander Grace (edited July 18, 2005).]

I will, Rose, I will! And soon. Thanks for your interest. But first, is nobody prepared to venture a guess as to the number of authors represented by my samples? Without googling, although surely some here will recognise some of the excerpts.

Many good points made by Alex.

Henry

Well, it seems everyone’s chicken!

Partial spoiler: the samples are from no more than three authors.

Henry I think I have one of them but I am indeed too chicken. One is not too far removed.

Janet

OK. b) is Larkin, c) is Heaney, the rest are me.

I imagine most people would agree that Larkin had a distinctive voice. But does it come across here, or could this bit of trimeter have been written by any number of authors?

The Heaney isn’t really in his typical voice, either.


[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited July 20, 2005).]

Henry the Chameleon. Clever.

I would have picked Larkin. (b) I do think it has his dying fall.

The first one is faux Murphy and didn't fool me although it confused me.

The dog....well...I ask you? Who else would have? ;)

It just proves that a "voice" is the sum of its parts and not parts of the sum. Your parts are excellent Henry.
Janet

I knew it all along!

Okay, I had no clue. But it doesn't really prove anything, Henry, except that Heaney and Larkin wrote small snippets of poetry that depart from their usual style.

Recognized poets do tend to have recognizable voices. To me, though, all that proves is that having a consistent voice can help a poet achieve fame; it doesn't necessarily make the poems themselves better.


[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited August 11, 2005).]

Poem removed for copyright reasons.

[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited August 15, 2005).]

Henry,
Whoever--it's marvellous. Les Murray, very possible, but can pin it on no one. Whoever, I love it.
Janet

(Ludicrous error edited out. I must have been on substances.)




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited August 12, 2005).]

One guess so far. Any Murray-lovers out there prepared to agree or disagree? Katy?

Henry,
I'm not at all sure it's Murray. It just could be but probably isn't.
Janet