We have voices in us whatever our age.
A single poem can have one sustained voice.
A single poem can have multiple voices.
A single poetry collection or book by a single author can have a single sustained voice.
A single poetry collection or book by a single author can contain multiple voices.
A single author can choose to develop a single voice throughout their career.
Single author can choose to develop multiple voices throughout their career.
If we know we could use multiple voices, we shouldn’t be too serious about having an original and unique voice.
A poet’s voice is a complex amalgam of other voices.
- How odd, then, that we should fervently believe in the “originality” of our writing, when it is clear that the self in words (like the self in life) is comprised from the intermingled, overlapping crosscurrents of so many others.
- The truth is, a writer’s voice is made from other writers’ voices. Pieced together, picked and chosen, stumbled into, uninformed: influence seems like an involuntary series of contagions that eventually turns into a sort of vessel, or transportation system.
- As we acquire a sense of taste, and perhaps a sense of vocation, our reading becomes more directed and targeted, but we are bent and shaped and destined to be changed by the genius of others.
- One eats the heart of the admired one and becomes them.
- The remarkable news is that this pastiche of voices results in the incarnation of a new poet, a new hybrid distillation of voice, capable of telling the story of experience in new, valuable ways.
- The remarkable news is that this pastiche of voices results in the incarnation of a new poet, a new hybrid distillation of voice, capable of telling the story of experience in new, valuable ways.
Reading is important in developing a voice
- Each strong new writer is a deep student of what she has read and an amalgam of preexisting sentences and styles that have never been combined like that before.
Poet as a single voice.
Poet as multiple voices.
Poets as curator.