Elements of Strong Voice
People say you should write how you talk. When they say this, they mean something like: it would be unnatural for me to have just written it is a truth universally acknowledged that one should pen verse consistent with the manner in which one converses. I don’t speak like Jane Austen in daily life. Some people actually do, now, in 2015. Others might sound more like Lupe Fiasco. Whatever your home diction and register, sounding natural seems to be a sought-after quality. When a writer’s syntax fits him or her comfortably, a relaxed, spontaneous musicality results.
Here’s a question: is natural the same as smooth? Many of us are not naturally smooth (have you ever been to a party full of writers?) What does it mean to be a smooth talker? A smooth talker does not hesitate, blush, mumble, or stutter. I have a tendency to experience vicarious nerves when I attend performances, and I can always tell when the actor or singer has settled into his or her show; my own nerves ease. I once attended a vocal performance master class where the instructor told us we should be like the airplane pilot coming on over the intercom; the audience should feel we have it all under control.
However.
Smoothness requires a kind of emotional SPF80, arrived at one of three ways that I can think of: near-psychotic grandiosity, virtuosic focus, or unwavering spiritual faith. We both distrust and admire smooth. If a speaker’s not under some kind of pressure, most of us don’t relate to her. “Smooth” without an antagonist is boring, safe, unnatural. We want to see the tightrope walker falter slightly, then not fall. We want to root for someone. We want to imagine ourselves prevailing over circumstance. I love the part in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” where she interrupts herself (“Write it!”). My friend Lori McKenna kept a vocal track on her record in which you can hear her choke up. Another friend kept in the sound of the piano bench creaking.
Strong voice is smooth, natural speech under pressure from contingency and emotion. Whether a poem’s speaker is a fictional character or the writer’s truest-at-that-moment Self, the writer must convey that speaker’s urgency. This act is a sort of paradox when you think of how colloquial it is to be “speechless” under duress. The writer/speaker despairs, laughs, has mystic visions, etc., while maintaining coherence. “Art is the act of making choices in a charged field,” writes Dean Young. A poet with a strong voice chooses to remain aware of her audience; she speaks toward somebody. In order to get across, she defers catharsis in favor of articulation. She must live in two times: on one hand, the immediate time of strong feeling (her own, her character’s), and on the other, Wordsworth’s “tranquility” from which feeling can be described and made sense of.
This post originally appeared on The Loft Literary Center’s blog, The Writer’s Block. You can see the original post here.
Sarah Green’s first full-length poetry collection, Earth Science, is forthcoming from 421 Atlanta. Her most recent poetry chapbook won the 2014 New Women’s Voices prize from Finishing Line Press. Poems of hers have appeared in Best New Poets 2012, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, Pleiades, FIELD,Passages North, Mid-American Review, Gettysburg Review, Cortland Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Medical Journal of Australia, Redivider, Ruminate, and elsewhere. She has been a Pushcart Prize winner, a Vermont Studio Center artist’s grant recipient, and is the 2015 first alternate in poetry for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Sarah has taught creative writing in both college and community education settings for over 13 years. She recently received her PhD in English from Ohio University.
