[Tom Jardine]

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

[David Mason]

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.

[Janet Kenny]

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).]

[David Mason]

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.

[Alder Ellis]

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.

[Janet Kenny]

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

[Tim Murphy]

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.

[Janet Kenny]

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

[Tim Murphy]

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.

[David Mason]

Symphony.