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Craft essay · Voice
An editorial look at voice not as a pose to adopt but as what accumulates when a writer pays sustained attention to a particular set of things over years.
By Poets of The Household6 min read
One of the most common pieces of advice in beginner workshops is "find your voice." It is also, in this editor's reading, one of the least useful as it is usually offered. The implication is that voice is a hidden thing the writer already has and has only to uncover, like a key in a coat pocket. Many poets find that the metaphor is wrong in a way that matters. Voice is not what you uncover. Voice is what accumulates.
What accumulates: what you have read; what you have refused to read; what you cannot stop noticing; the rhythms you grew up inside; the questions you keep asking even when nobody asked you to. Voice is the residue of that attention. It is not a style choice. It is what is left after years of choices.
A working distinction. Pose is a vocal stance you adopt — the brittle ironist, the wounded confessional speaker, the wise observer of small mercies. Pose is borrowed; it can be put on or taken off; it is recognisable in workshop drafts as the smell of recent reading. Pose is not the same as influence — influence is part of how voice forms — but pose stops at the surface. Many poets find that their early drafts read like an inventory of recent reading, and that the work of the next five years is the work of letting that inventory settle.
Voice is what survives after the pose drops away. Donald Hall, in Death to the Death of Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1994), wrote that "the poet's voice and gesture provide entrance to the poetry: a way in, a hand at the elbow." Notice what the metaphor is doing: voice is the way the reader is invited in. It is recognisable, but it is not the same thing as personality, and it cannot be performed. Hall returns through the collection to the working observation that a sustained body of poems builds voice the way a long marriage builds a shared language — incrementally, through accumulation, in private.
Mary Oliver, in her essay collection Upstream (Penguin Press, 2016), describes being separated from her parents in the woods as a child and finding herself, in the absence of supervision, becoming a noticer. The book's much-quoted line — attention is the beginning of devotion — closes the title essay, and Oliver's wider point is that attention without feeling is "just a report." The implication for voice is that voice is what a particular pattern of attention sounds like when it is given language. Two writers can read the same shelf of books, the same field of references, the same news, and produce two different voices because the pattern of attention is different. One writer keeps noticing the angles of light. Another keeps noticing how a sentence holds power. The pattern itself is the voice.
This is why the workshop instruction to "be more yourself" is often unhelpful. You cannot will yourself into a pattern of attention you do not already have. You can, however, notice which things you keep coming back to in drafts, which images recur uninvited, which sounds you reach for under pressure. The voice is already in the recurrences. The editorial work is to stop covering it up.
Lucille Clifton's poems are among the most recognisable in late-twentieth-century American poetry. The Poetry Foundation's essay on her signature poem, won't you celebrate with me (from The Book of Light, Copper Canyon Press, 1993), notes the characteristic surface: "short, frequently enjambed, uncapitalized free verse lines, with relatively plain language, and its first-person speaker uses a modest-looking lowercase i." The lowercase i, the absence of capitalisation, the short line — these are not stylistic eccentricities. They are decisions Clifton made by rejecting a set of other available choices: the high lyric register, the long meditative line, the rhetorical sentence. Voice in Clifton is not just what she chose; it is what she would not do.
The editor's bias here is toward treating refusal as part of the formation of voice. Many poets find that the question what kind of poem will I not write? is more useful than what is my voice?. Refusals tend to be more stable than enthusiasms. Refusals tend to be the part of a writer that does not change every five years.
A common worry among writers in their first decade is that their voice keeps shifting. The worry usually misreads what voice is. Faiz Ahmad Faiz's first book, Naqsh-e-Faryadi (1943), is largely the love-and-loss lyric inherited from late Urdu romantic tradition. His second, Dast-e-Saba (1952), and his third, Zindan Namah (1956) — both written in part during his four-year imprisonment after the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case — sound very different. The political and the lyric are pressed together; the inheritance is the same vocabulary, but the pressure on the vocabulary has changed. Faiz's voice did not "stabilise" once and stay still. It accumulated through what he kept reading (the Urdu ghazal, the Persian masnavi, the international left), what he rejected (the pure aestheticism of some of his contemporaries), and what he could not stop noticing (the conditions of his country, the prisons he kept finding himself inside).
Ellen Bryant Voigt, in The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia Press, 1999), reads voice as the working result of a long set of structural decisions — pace, register, syntactic length, the relationship of speaker to material — and argues for reading as a writer reads, "with equal parts passion and analysis." Voigt's case is that voice changes because the structural decisions that compose it have not yet stabilised, and that stabilising them is a question of having written enough poems to see one's own patterns from the outside. The editor's bias here is toward treating voice-shifting in early work as evidence of formation, not evidence of failure.
Contemporary writing online sometimes treats voice as a kind of brand identity — a recognisable signature the reader can spot in the first three lines, like a logo. The instinct is understandable; a recognisable surface helps readers find the writer. But voice that has hardened into brand tends to refuse the change that genuine accumulation would otherwise produce. The poems start to confirm the brand rather than report what the writer is actually noticing. Heather McHugh, in Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), writes about the way a working voice has to keep failing the reader's expectations at the right rate — keep being recognisable enough to track, surprising enough to be alive. The editor's bias here is toward voice that allows itself to be surprised by its own material.
A few editorial suggestions, named as observations rather than rules:
A final note. The instruction "find your voice" is usually given as a shortcut. The real instruction underneath it is "keep paying attention to the things that have always interested you, and let the language settle around that attention." That is the slow version. It is also the one that produces work that survives more than its first season.
Pull ten of your drafts together. In one sitting, list every image, sound, or sentence-pattern that recurs across three or more. Then list three moves you keep declining to make. The two lists together are a portrait of voice in formation.
Nine essays on lyric craft; the readings of Bishop and Plath underpin the essay above's argument that voice is the result of accumulated structural decisions.
Source for 'attention is the beginning of devotion' and the noticer-in-the-woods passage the essay quotes.
Working editorial reading of the signature poem from The Book of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 1993); useful evidence for the refusal-as-voice argument.
Essays on poetic attention and partiality; the chapter on fragments grounds the essay's claim that working voice must keep failing the reader's expectations at the right rate.
Biographical sketch and selected poems; useful background for the reading of Faiz's voice as evolving across Naqsh-e-Faryadi, Dast-e-Saba, and Zindan Namah.