Dramatic Voice

Some day I'll write an essay on dramatic voice in poetry. I thought I'd have done so by now, but the interruptions are too many, the time too short. So what I'll do here is pile up a few notes and see if they engender discussion.

In his essay "On Emerson," Frost declared that "Writing is un-boring to the extent that it is dramatic." Statements like this bring us into an area of discussion that is hard for prosodic purists to follow, because, I think, we're talking about technique that goes beyond technique, measure that goes beyond measure. Now that is dangerously close to the poppycock of Williams's "variable foot," so I should be clear that I don't mean anything of the sort. One can write in strict iambics with very selective variations and still have what Frost would call dramatic voice. What we're talking about here is his "sound of sense," yes, and we're also talking about tone and all that jazz. We're talking about "sounding" like a person instead of something more mechanical and contrived, and obviously across time one's notions of such "sound" are going to change.

On a purely philosophical level, of course, a "text" has no sound. Your voice has the sound, and how you choose to perform a given text is the sound of that moment. In an oral culture at the dawn of poetry, the sound of your voice would be understood to be the poem, whereas now we associate such sounds with the words on the page and speak of a poet's "voice." Jack Foley reminds me time and again to re-read Father Walter Ong's book on orality versus the text-centered idea of "literature," and he is right to do so.

But in practice I find it helpful to think that what I am writing has a voice. Humor me for a while. When I read the medieval poem "Western Wind," I don't come away from the words with the impression that this is to be screamed or sung out like "There's No Business Like Show Business." I have instead the impression of a quiet, private voice, yearning to go home, a voice that in a mere four lines might change mood considerably.

Western wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain
Christ that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

That apostrophe of line 3 might be any things--it might be muttered under the breath--but we can say that it's not a scream of fright, can't we? So we can say that even before we perform them, or at least while we perform them "in our heads," some texts are suggestive of vocal range. A poem might suggest speed or slowness, volume or quietude, a sort of emphasis inhering in the words but, as it were, over the words or under them as well.

Jack will tell me this is nonsense. I am content to speak nonsense--sorry, I mean type nonsense--if it helps me get closer to what I mean.

In "Poetry and School" Frost made his well-known statement that "Almost everyone should almost have experienced the fact that a poem is an idea caught fresh in the act of dawning." I love several things about that statement, not least the two "almosts," as if he's winking at us the whole time he's making his declaration. This is of course like Yeats saying that no matter how hard we work on a poem, it has to "seem a moment's thought." This is also what novelists like Nabokov mean by their metaphors for charming and luring and entrapping us in their illusions. Artists are (like mothers and nuns, right?) worshippers of images, but also makers of images and manipulators of images, a prospect that takes us dangerously close to the politicians.

I digress. Why does some verse strike us a "workmanlike," satisfying its technical demands, but somewhat less compelling than other verse? Frost would have said the difference is in the drama, the force of emotion through the words. Look at a passage of ten-syllable lines from Yeats. You can sure talk of technique in the shifting position of the caesura, the use of enjambment, etc., but you've got to say the thing aloud to know what a magnificent piece of verse writing it is:

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

I've always thought of Yeats's ottava rima stanzas as being like little verbal hand grenades pulsing with contradictory energies so that the form was just about to explode. But it doesn't explode. It is contained. And in the final stanza of his great poem Yeats recovers himself into something that, however necessary, is a shade less magnificent:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

If one reads the poem with an eye to dramatic voice, one can feel the force of an entire personality behind it (enriched by our understanding of Yeats's life and ideas, of course); one can "hear," as it were, a man in conflict with himself, trying to control his conflict finally with an idea, then realizing that the idea will be about the very world that tormented him in the first place. One has to talk about the poem the way an actor would talk about a speech of Shakespeare, working through the issues of motivation and the ambiguities as he refines his performances.

But by dramatic voice Frost did not only mean something so intense and impassioned. He meant also what Heaney calls the little spring of human speech worked into a line. If I choose, I can get picky about the use of the word "Hark" in Frost's "Come In," but if I grant him a little audacity I can see the marvelous pacing of his lines. The poem is a great lyric, but it is driven by dramatic voice, a process of the performing mind:

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music--hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went--
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.

This is a sort of high-wire act in which the perimeters of form and the exigencies of "voice" are managed with a great, rueful deftness.

In "Conversations on the Craft of Poetry" with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, Frost opined that "you've got to act up." He associates acting and writing, and I think I understand him here. He associates writing and performance, and knows that even in conversation people are performative. He wants to get some of that apparently spontaneous performance into what he writes because he doesn't want to sound like a book--he wants to sound like a person.

Here's Frost in the interview:

"What sayest thou, old barrelful of lies?" Chaucer says. What'd you say, "old barrelful of lies"? And you can hear it talk just the same today--and all of it. That why it exists. It's beautiful, anywhere you look into Chaucer:

Since I from love escaped am so fat,
I never think to have been in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count him not a bean.

This is Chaucer talking too. It's just the same now. I hear the country people talking, England and here, with these same ways of acting up. Put it that way--call it "acting up."
You act when you talk. Some do more than others. Some little children do: some just seem to be rather straight line, but some switch their whole body when they talk--switch their skirts. Expressiveness comes over with them. Words aren't enough.

Now, leaving Frost, I'm back at the difficult dilemma of my opening. In a sense, words aren't enough, yet a poet has only words to work with (if we're talking of text, that is). This is where the force driving those words must surprise us, must open up the unexpected in diction or in thought that keeps a thing fresh and alive. This is the idea of the dramatic voice that we can bring to the process of writing, knowing full well that we will eventually release the poem to the freedom of other voices who perform it as they please, but knowing we offer some guidelines in the words as we write them.

When I think of the very best poets--the best of Larkin, say, as I come to appreciate him more and more--it's partly the powerful sense of a living contemporary or near-contemporary I hear in the poems that draws me to him. I might not agree with his pessimism on all occasions. I might tell myself that I do not fear death as Larkin did, though perhaps I'm wrong to say so. But my disagreements pale in comparison with the dramatic reality, the presence of human reality, inhering in his words.

Again, I am willing to admit that as philosophy this idea of dramatic voice does not hold water. But I know of no other way to speak about that quality separating the sheep from the goats, as it were, the living word from the dead one.

David Mason






[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited August 19, 2004).]

David,

I find this all rather common-sensical, but agree nonetheless.

The trouble with voice is that it's like teaching acting--difficult, and on more than one occasion hard to put into words. Compounding that is the trouble of some folk being able to hear the powerful extra-strength voices, but not the subtle ones.

One critique which I've sometimes heard of novels is that "the author hasn't found his voice yet," as if all voices had to be ranting from the rooftops, as opposed to, oh, say, occasionally quirky, and switching modes as a regular person does in the course of conversation. Though there's more time for this sort of thing in a novel or play than there is in the small space of a poem.

The trouble I find with the workmanlike, in prose as well as poetry, well, I'll quote Marion Zimmer Bradley on this one, in reference to the short stories of a certain school of authors (who I'll not note, since some are friends), "They all write nice tight little stories that are wound up to do what they're supposed to do, and I don't much care for them."

I think we can say the same thing about the mincing manicured every-hair-in-its-place yet strangely soulless sonnets you often run across. Another name for it is greeting card poetry, where the sentiments are so generic as to have all the soul of a kabuki mask--emotion, yes, but curiously stylized.

To cultivate voice, what you need to do is to listen to the way people speak, and use it.

The Greeks have a great word for agreement: symphony.

Dave
Bravo! The reason for poetry in fact.
Poetry isn't alone in this. A pianist who fails to find the dramatic voice of the music is a typing bore. Accuracy should be assumed. The dramatic voice is where the real game starts. It's true of painting too.
It's what I sometimes call the calligraphy of art (any art).
Janet

Voice is a rather mysterious thing. I lost mine for about twenty years when I stopped writing poetry, so when I started up again, I was surprised to see what came out. It was a forceful, authoritative voice, and no matter what character I tried to assume for dramatic monologues, that quality was a constant. I did not know that that was my voice, perhaps in the way that one's own voice sounds different on a tape recording. I assume that what had happened in the intervening years was a slow process of maturation, so that by the time I started writing again, I felt "I am who I am. I know what I know," and that that quality comes through no matter what I try to do. I think it is a limitation of my ability to get inside some characters. If I don't feel that I have something in common with them, I usually don't attempt it.

Susan

Susan
I see "voice" as being an ability to adapt to the content--to become one with the mood. It can be restrained and controlled or strong--whatever--and I think that there is always some element of the writer in any mood. That's not a matter of choice. I think the greatest danger we face is to try to please everybody which can remove those important eccentricities which give life to a poem. It's good that you have a strong voice. I always find you very secure in your phrasing and certain about what it is you want to say. I admire that quality in your writing.

I think we need this dramatic talent whether we are writing a cool abstract poem, a poem about landscape or a poem about people. It's what makes the reader believe the poem.
Janet

I don't think I have anything at all in common with the two characters in "The Collector's Tale." One is a rhyming gay shop owner, the other an itinerant halfbreed collector and drunkard who speaks in blank verse. I don't think "my" voice is the only issue in dramatic voice, but the dramatic tendency itself, the thrust of a problem and the dynamism of character that color the language we use.

David,
I see that you mean entering the character. The amazing thing (for me) about Shakespeare is that each character speaks for him/herself. They each live in the bubble of their character and even the villains give a fine well reasoned account of themselves.

I have remembered an anecdote I told Nyctom the other day in a PM. A successful novelist who is a friend lived with an opera singer who is a friend. She was lamenting about the stresses of being a performer and how she felt drained after the performance was over. He retorted:"Performance? My whole working life is a performance. I give a performance every time I sit down at my type writer."
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited August 21, 2004).]

I've got no quarrel about poets speaking in a voice of their own, but Shakespeare, now--what is Shakespeare's voice? I love the guy. If my voice is speaking in many voices, that suits me fine. I also think poets can learn the power of emphathy from fiction writers. Poets can write about a bigger world if they inhabit other people's skin for while. All you have to do is pretend--it's not any harder than what you did as a child pretending to be someone else. As I've said in an essay,l empathy is a civilizing experience. It's an important form of play that adults too often lose sight of.

David, I like what you said about voice, and the ability to speak in different voices. Even without portraying different characters, or writing poetry at all, one and the same person in the course of a day often speaks in a whole variety of voices and tones...singing in the shower, shouting at bumper-to-bumper traffic, making a sales pitch at work, telling a joke over drinks, consoling a friend, stammering sweet nothings on a big date, whatever.

I'm curious whether you think the current emphasis on having a unique "voice" tends to limit writers once they're identified with a particular "schtick," i.e., do they get pigeonholed by their readers and critics and not allowed to escape to try something new. ("Too bad about so-and-so's new book...seems to have lost his way, lost his voice!")

For example, might Frost's success as the philosophical farmer (certainly not the whole man, and an odd persona for a San Francisco boy) have kept him from trying some completely different things? Or can Kim Addonizio ever write now about something other than alcohol, sex and depression, without someone saying she's lost her edge? (I'm not criticizing either writer, both of whom I like.)

David,

Good essay on writing and speech, sound and sense. I think there are a good number who have studied this kind of thing with poetry.

Your; "As I've said in an essay, empathy is a civilizing experience. It's an important form of play that adults too often lose sight of."

I agree with you, and if I may add, studies have shown that some people simply do not have the capacity for empathy to any great extent--it is a brain thing. Some people can do math, some can do music, some have emotional intelligence while others don't, etc. Take my brother-in-law, for example; no empathy at all: if it doesn't bounce, crash, or go 'boom', it doesn't exist. Ask him about "FLIR" and he will tell you. (Forward Looking Infared Radar) People have different smarts.

Also, I'd like to add that writers today need to include as much knowledge of modern psycho-dynamics as possible in their concepts of writing and subject. Freud, Jung, unconsious conditioning, social-economic conditioning, class, culture, education, personal development, self-actualization, and a dozen other approaches to what I call consciousness, poetry as consciousness.

Too many poets write without regard to science as well as a disregard to literary history.

Take Sylvia Plath, for example, some of her poems do seem disturbed, or, problematic, and they were written when psychiatric help was a sort of skeleton in the closet. Now, poems like hers, would elicit from me the response, go get some help.

The point, going back to empathy, is, that people either can't do 'empathy' or, if they can but don't, they are either conditioned out of it, not trained in it, or they are psychologically blocked from feeling empathy because of some reason.

The Myers-Briggs discussion relates to this.

Sound......empathy..... So, David, what's next?

TJ

Bruce raises a good point. Having too little personality would be bad for a poet, but being identified too closely with one kind of personality is also a real limitation. Look at how many poets, once they become "established" in some way, become parodies of themselves. I think of poets from William Matthews to Charles Wright and WS Merwin who have published so much and so often than one feels, often , one is reading the same damn poem over and over with slight variations. I do think it's helpful for us to try to broaden our range, either in subject or in form, over time. As recognizably Yeatsian or Frostian those whole careers are, look how much variety they each worked into what they did. Maybe Auden and Hardy are good masters in this respect, though Auden was less good at character than Hardy.

Dave
I posted a poem then decided it was better just to ask whether a poem with direct speech qualifies or does the entire poem have to be written in another voice for you to apply the description "dramatic voice" ?
Written from another sympathy , not necessarily that of the writer?

Janet




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited August 22, 2004).]

Janet's question goes to the heart of the matter. I first thought of dramatic voice only in relation to the dramatic monologue, which has been a genre I've gone back to more than once. But when I had to teach a course in the dramatic monologue at West Chester this year I realized that a personal lyric, such as those by Yeats and Frost quoted in my notes beginning this thread, can have a dramatic impulse in the way human speech is captured by the poets. This is what Frost is getting at when he discusses the idiom of Chaucer.

So dramatic voice can exist in a poem of "direct" speech, I would say. And I would also say that, if you have trouble understanding dramatic voice, then playing with masks or personae will be helpful to you. Once you move into the genre of the dramatic monologue you also start thinking a bit like a fiction writer and a narrative poet. You think about things like conflict, and whether there will be rising action, as it were, accompanied by rising intensity in speech,or another set of issues.

You motivated me to look up the Frost interview which is quite good & amusing, in a way, in the number of different ways Frost comes at the same point. The interviewer begins by reminding him of how he once said that a poem needs "dramatic accent," & Frost says, yeah, it has to be "catchy" (lines from Shakespeare "stick to you like burrs thrown on you in holiday foolery. You don't have to try to remember them.") Then, it has to have "expression." ("It ought to fight being set to music if it's got expression in it.") Then, it needs "meaning" (which is what makes a poet "act up" in the part you quoted). Then, "mood," in connection with which he says:

"Somebody said to be a master writer you don't have to wait for your moods. That'd be like Browning as he got older. You get to be a virtuoso, and you aren't a poet any more. He'd lost his moods somewhere. He'd got to be a master. We don't want to be masters."

Then, a poem is "a little voyage of discovery" or, more concisely, a "dawn" -- the unpremeditated, uncontrived element. Finally, it needs "fresh observation."

You could probably elaborate any of these approaches into a philosophy of poetry, or an attempt to articulate the essential "thing" that brings a poem to life & justifies its existence. Not just individually, but generically, insofar as every successful poem justifies poetry as a unique & indispensable form of discourse.

You say: "we're talking about technique that goes beyond technique, measure that goes beyond measure."

Technique as such is mechanical & could be simulated. The "beyond" dimension is specifically human. Think of the compelling sci-fi mythology of the difficulty of differentiating sophisticated robots from people: the subversive subtext being, are we not robots ourselves? How do we know we're not? How do you tell a real poem from a "mechanical and contrived" sonnet exercise? Same kind of distinction.

Perhaps there is a basic difference in motivation. A good poem derives from a motivation to say something, a bad poem from a motivation to "be a poem," to simulate the condition of a real poem. A good poem uses the means of poetry to its own meaningful ends; a bad poem makes the poetical means ends in themselves, sort of fetishes. The "dramatic voice" would be the sense that the poetical means are being subordinated to the speaker's ends. The speaker is not trying to be a poet; he's trying to say something, using poetry as the best available means.

Something like that, maybe.

AE
I have been a performer and there is a point where performing and being a vehicle for something transcendental merge. It isn't necessarily a betrayal of the highest poetic motives to start by being possessed by something outside oneself. I suspect it is like that for some great prose writers.
I agree that a poet must reduce the words to a state where they embody something beyond daily thought.
Janet

At present I think our poetry is impoverished by a lack of dramatic voice, or put another way, of distinctive voices. Somebody put up a Wilbur poem at Mastery and asked us to guess the author. It was a new poem I hadn't seen, but to me it was a no-brainer. Nobody sounds like Dick (except Tim Steele now and then!) I think the same can be said of Tony Hecht and Mr. Heaney. But when I read McSonnets in the Formalist, I don't hear a lot of distinctive voices, just a lot of people who have mastered the rudiments of writing 14 line pentameters. And too often I'm hearing words on a page, not human speech. We don't have a lot of distinctive voices at the Sphere. Hayes, Beaton, Murray would be hard to mistake for anyone else. Same with Kevin Murphy. Who WOULD want to sound like Kevin in this century!! I think a dramatic, distinctive voice proceeds from cultivating a distinctive ear. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts our best poets are those who have committed to memory the largest amount of poetry. Spend an evening with Mason or Gwynn talking poetry, and you will be amazed at what's in their heads.

A dramatic voice also entails some experience in life. Early Yeats, however good, is not particularly distinguishable from a bunch of other Edwardian, post romantic fluff. Late Yeats cannot be mistaken for D.G. Rosetti. And I don't care whether I'm reading West Running Brook or The Bearer of Bad Tidings. After A Boy's Will, I know I'm reading Frost. Similarly, after the Early Poems in my first book, I found a distinctive way of laying my sentences into the line, whether they're short or long, whether I'm talking bird dogs or writing about Italy.

Joe Harrison is at least as accomplished a versifier as Greg Williamson, but I don't find his "voice" nearly so distinctive. There is an agile playfulness in Greg that no other poet has. Not since Stevens died, anyway. There is a wisdom in Rhina which is entirely her own. So it's part technique, partly what persona a poet chooses to project. The important thing is that through the long accretion of a body of work, we find the voice to be one we long to hear. Above all, a voice we want to return to when the speaker is dead. No day passes me by without lines from Hardy and Frost and Yeats and Auden running through my head. That's VOICE.

Tim
I agree with what you have written, but Dave said he meant something beyond the individual poet's identity/soul/ mind/whatever.
I think he meant that one should start with that "voice" and build on top of it.
Many of those you have named have done that of course.
Janet

Janet, I understand the distinction, and I'll try to make it clearer. I think dramatic voice is a characteristic of the poem, and that distinctive voice is created by the slow accretion of a lifetime's work in wielding a dramatic voice in the creation of many poems.

Symphony.

I'm sure many of us have had the experience of having a narrator barge into our consciousness as we write, as if to say, "Hey, I'm telling this story, get out of my way!"

Often, that's the only way I am able to get out of the way of the poetry I write. It makes for much better poetry, I think...so long as my grasp of dialect and mannerisms enables the narrator to put forth his or her personality convincingly.

My first published poem (last September, yea!) was a set of six sonnets telling the Red Riding Hood story with six different narrators: the inner-city mother, the high-society grandmother, the absentee father, the accused wolf's mother, the wolf (who sees himself in his victim), and the girl (who comments on "Peter and the Wolf" more than her own story). The narrators and versions vary so greatly that these characters could not actually co-inhabit the same story.

Some of these dramatic personae worked much better than others. (I think I overdid the dialect for the mom, for example--rural white writers attempt inner-city black dialogue at their peril.) But it was interesting to approach the same basic storyline from completely different mindsets.

Julie Stoner



[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited August 23, 2004).]

Entertainingly, to get to Tim's question about "who would want to write like that in this century!" it's been a new century for about four years, and I'm currently reading the work of someone else who's writing something very much old fashioned post-post modernist: Daniel Handler's "A Series of Unfortunate Events," written in persona as Lemony Snickett, telling the tongue in cheek melodrama adventures of the Baudelaire orphans (and soon to be a movie next fall with Jim Carey as the villainous Count Olaf).

Having had a severely demented Victorian epistolery novel recently published (and paid for, though not as wildly promoted), I think it's not that unreasonable.

Things come back into fashion because folk enjoy them.

Fair enough. I hope the things I love come back in fashion.

Dave, I've found this discussion very enlightening. Tim had mentioned that my All I Need to Know poem currently being workshopped on the Deep End was the sort of thing you were talking about in the Dramatic Voice thread here, and that surprised me until I read the thread and understood what you are getting at. The voice of my narrator is rather more understated than dramatic in the fiery or melodramatic sense. But I think I understand what he meant by that comment now; in acting or performing sometimes the best way to emphasize is to lower the voice rather than to raise it. If you have time I hope you'll look at the poem.

Thanks for this thread and for the narrative discussion. This is the kind of poetry I read for enjoyment.

Carol

Carol,
That's what we literary types call a kick-ass poem. I love the clincher in the last line, and how I makes good use of natural idiom.
Bravo.
Dave