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.
|