Tony Hoagland - The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice

THE ART OF

VOICE

Poetic Principles and Practice

TONY HOAGLAND

with KAY COSGROVE

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Copyright 2019 by the Estate of Tony Hoagland

All rights reserved

First Edition

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This book is for students of poetry, especially my students

ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT TO DEFINE ELEMENTS IN poetry is voice, the distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual speaker. In many poems voice is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it memorable, that holds it together and aloft like the womb around an embryo. Voice can be more primary than any story or idea the poem contains, and voice carries the cargo forward to delivery. When we hear a distinctive voice in a poem, our full attention is aroused and engaged, because we suspect that here, now, at last, we may learn how someone else does itthat is, how they live, breathe, think, feel, and talk.

This collection of short chapters emphasizes the ways in which a strong poetic voice is connective, binding the speaker and the reader into a conversation compelling enough to be called a relationship. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an animate thing of shifting balances, tones, and temperature, by turns intimate, confiding, vulgar, distant, or cunningbut, above all, alive. In its vital connectivity, it is capable of including both the manifold world and the rich slipperiness of human nature. At the risk of sounding naively patriotic, such aliveness of voice seems like a special strength of American poetry in the last hundred years.

You could say that, whatever the matter of a poem is, it is carried along on the fluid tide of a voice. If a poem is to some degree about story or theme, then the medium that delivers that information is the dimension of voice. Alternatively, we could say that voice embodies, not any set of particular facts, but the presence of a self, a personality or a sensibility. Maybe a complex poetic voice even communicates the history of how that sensibility developed.

In pre-1900s English poetry, the poetic voice tended to be rhetorically lofty, authoritative, wisdom-dispensing, and high-minded. Consider, for example, the passionate but didactic voice of a poem like Wordsworths The World Is Too Much with Us:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Wordsworths poem is delivered by a strong speaker, but not a very intimate one by our standards. Contemporary poetry, and the poetry of twentieth-century America, shifted the footing of much poetry to the conversational and the highly mobile speech register of one ordinary person speaking confidentially to another. Here is the opening to Eleanor Lermans poem Ode to Joy:

Four drinks after nine oclock at the

sports bar down by the riverthe river

that is commanded by Newtonian forces,

or so they say. They also say that

particles collide, but Ive never seen

that happen. And then, of course,

there is the theory that giant lizards

are patrolling outer space in spiny ships,

..........................

From just eight lines of Lermans poem we can deduce a lot about its speaker. She is both educated and unpretentious, of a bemused and skeptical temperament; she is a person who is frank, even blunt, freely imaginative and a little profligate. As a reader, on some level you might ask yourself: Am I going to continue reading this poem? And if so, am I going to keep reading because of the story, or the voice? Probably the latter.

What do we want from a contemporary poetic voice? One good answer to that question is that we want to feel that we are encountering a speaker in person, a speaker who presents a convincingly complex version of the world and of human nature. When we commence reading a poem, we are starting a relationship, and we want that relationship to be with an interesting, resourceful companion.

A WRITERS ABILITY TO PROJECT A VOICE ON THE PAGE is the product of many distinct verbal skills, acquired from myriad sources and practiced a great deal. Good writing is built on a kind of athletic virtuosity, the assemblage and combination of different muscular movements, like those of a good dancer. If you broke down any sport into its constituent parts, you would discover that hundreds of precise muscular movements are required to swing a 3-iron, or catch a ground ball, or clear a high jump. A good poem is likewise a performance that emerges from a set of precisely coordinated and much-rehearsed skills.

One way to make a convincing poetic voice is to display the mind in motion, or the mind changing direction as it speaks. We like to say I changed my mind, but the human mind alters its direction so rapidly and constantly, we might as well say My mind changed me. In a poem, this changing movement can be represented in many ways. It can be embodied through a kind of stuttering hesitation, or by a spontaneous uncensoredness, or as a deepening tangle of psychology. It can be performed as anxiety, or carefree light-headedness, or as overconfident swagger, or as steady, painstaking thoughtfulness.

When we can see a speaker changing his or her mind while actually in the middle of speech, it catches our interest. For example, here are some lines from a well-known poem by Frank OHara called Poem:

I was trotting along and suddenly

it started raining and snowing

and you said it was hailing

but hailing hits you on the head

hard so it was really snowing and

raining and I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

OHaras poem features a chatty, spontaneous speaker who is rambling along, narrating without premeditation. The poems lack of punctuation and the extended, breathless run-on sentence represent the stream of consciousness of the speakers speedy and unedited mindthe mind itself, you could say, is trotting along.