The Singing Voice

Yes, you guessed it, I am merely referring to a writer's voice, an expression one often hears. More specifically to a poet's literary or poetic voice. Every writer has a literary voice. Most of what I say here could apply to poetry or prose writers.

Like singing voices, some literary voices are immediately indentifiable, and others less so. You do not mistake Ray Charles for Elvis Presley, but you immediately recognize both voices. A uniqueness of voice is one important attribute for recording stars. A guy who sounds just like another star isn't going anywhere, except as a novelty act at the state or county fair.

There is one huge difference between a literary voice and a singing voice--the building blocks of the singing voice in musicians' slang are called chops, more precisely the attunement of the vocal chords to their surroundings. You are born with the voice with which you must sing. It can be develoved to its maximum singing potential, but the basic tonal tambre of it can never change with development. You can purify that sound, though not some quality within it which is hard to isolate and describe. This is you. The singer. Your identity.

Does something translate to natural chops for poets as well? Perhaps the environment and upbringing she got stuck with the way the singer gets stuck with his genetic voice, are her natural chops. Some would say, wellll (I pulled out of Pittsburg a-rollin' down that eastern seaboard), the brain she got stuck with is her chops, man.

I don't care. All I know is she can develop her voice so that she can sing both opera and rock-a-billy, and anything in between with unpredictable results, if she works hard enough. A poet's voice is much bigger than just a few genes in the neck. It develops as you write more, though traces of it are always evident in the juvenilia, just like the genetic voice. There it is--you again, your identity, the quality that makes your voice identifiable out of the masses.

There is probably not a single poem of Wallace Stevens that one familiar with he and Frost, would mistake for a Frost poem, and vice versa. Those two voices do not meditate upon a rooster or a snowman the same way at all, let me tell you.

It is not yoursef that you are trying to find. Those two gentlemen above were not trying to find themselves. They were making language. Nothing else could satisfy them. They made language for itself, and for their moment. In this they might find themselves, not the other way around. That is where your voice lies--in the language you make with it, not somewhere outside of it. You have more freedom and lattitude than the singer. You can change your style immediately. An opera singer has a heck of a time trying to sing rock-abilly acceptably, because he has to remember how to sing wrong and then "un-apply" years of training. As poets, we are in the most versatile and flexible art of all, yet we ask only the same thing of it--affect us mightily somehow.

Make enough language and the voice emerges. You can tamper with it. Its tambre is not set genetically.

The singing voices of poets evolve individually, sometimes moderately, sometimes a great deal, as much as a man's aging face can make him unrecognizable to old classmates. The voice of Yeats changed with every book, as he hammered on it. Anyone could be forgiven for not connecting the poet of the 80's and 90's with the poet who penned The Second Coming.

Watch the voice of Roethke struggle to break free of the grand Yeatsian mode. The man reverted to baby talk for one of his greatest sustained acheivements and to reach a voice that did not echo of W.B.Y.

To other poets, their literary voice comes almost as naturally as their genetic one, it seems. I am thinking of someone like Billy Collins. They are so firmly in their voice that it might even be hard to change...wellll, (it seems like a month since I kissed my baby goodbye) changing it consciously is always hard though, isn't it? That is what Yeats was doing, by the way, he was consciously working on his poetic voice the way a mechanic tinkers with a car's engine. Yeats rebuilt the engine. I am not familiar with Mr. Collins' views on the poetic voice. One hundred percent of the time it is a mistake to think that because a great poet sounds lucid and spontaneous that he is being spontaneous. There is no doubt Billy Collins works as hard on his poetry as any poet of his stature does to make it sound the way it does. Once a poet finds his voice, that is a beautiful thing. I get the feeling staying in voice is easy for him, and there is no need to change what was not copped elewhere, or fix what is not broken, except as it pleases one to tinker, i.e. make language.

I keep hearing voices, so I have to go on.

The poetic voice has habits. These habits are part of its character. It makes language within these habits. When the habits are too extreme or unmannerly, the voice becomes socially unacceptable, and it is hard to find company.

Yeats was so conscious of everything about his poetry, of making it identifiable and able to withstand time. Yeats, a bit more than the normal great poet, considered these things at length. Every poet thinks of them. But look how much poetry Yeats wrote whose subject was poetry itself or the writing of it. This writing about poetry itself is one of the features that makes the poetry of Yeats so attractive to me. How could you not write about poetry extensively if it figures prominently in your vision of paradise? This is why Yeats is so great--he was welding everything together, making his own paradisal afterlife, fusing mystical poetic traditions with mundane voices and subjects.

Some voices write about the voice or poetry itself a lot. What is wrong with this? Nothing to me, though I believe the penchant is out of vogue with today's poetic vanguard. I still love to find great poems about poetry or the writing of it. In a list of great subjects for poets, poetry has to be on there.

* * * * *

Poet's do not always want to keep a successful voice. Roethke did not want to do baby talk for the rest of his career. Poet's often have found themselves dissatisfied that the old voice cannot get the new language-making right. In this sense, most poets are always struggling for something new, since they themselves along with their perceptions are constantly changing.

* * * * *

Sometimes it is a matter of finding an appropriate voice for a vision, as Roethke did. For a prose example, the short, explosive sentences of Camus' The Stranger, are not indicative of his general style. Such choppiness is fully at home in Hemingway. Camus merely employed the technique for one novel for reasons of the artist.

The poetic voice can be something of a chameleon. It does not have to stay put. What it has to do, what it is driven to do, is make language that satisfies its hunger temporarily.

The voice is a great critic of itself, constantly tinkering with its creations, pulling out a comma and the like, or rethinking its whole stance.

* * * * *

A particular and constant habit of the Yeatsian voice figured around the useage of the word "but," believe it or not. Those who know Yeats well also know this well. If you use that word a particular way you will sound like Yeats to the acclimated ear, so one must actually avoid the useage in order to not sound idiosyncratically like Yeats. But for this and but for that puts some feet in those shoes I am talking about. Habit. Quirk. Idiosyncracy. Identifier. And never forget it is his identifier.

It is amazing that someone could put a tacit copyright in poetry on something as common as a useage of the the word but. More like a polite no tresspassing notice. Such things happen elsewhere in the arts as well, though. If the chord progression of your song is Am to F#m several times in a row, in a hurry you will be accused of plagarizing Light My Fire, so unique is that sound of the i-vi chord change. I do not believe there is another such instance in all of pop music, where a two chord change more or less tacitly belongs to an artist. A few have tried it. But who cares, unless they can exploit the odd change radically differently? None were able to that I heard.