Blood groups and diet - part 3

THE ART OF VOICE

INTRODUCTION

ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT TO DEFINE ELEMENTS IN poetry is the voice, the distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual speaker. In many poems, voice is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it memorable, which 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 it—that is, how they live, breathe, think, feel, and talk.

This collection of short chapters emphasizes how 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 cunning—but, 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 an 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 Wordsworth’s “The world is just too a lot with us; late and shortly,”:

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, very cruel grace!

Wordsworth’s 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 Lerman’s poem “Ode to Joy”:

Four drinks after nine o’clock at the

sports bar down by the river—the river

that is commanded by Newtonian forces,

or so they say. They also say that

particles collide, but I’ve 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 Lerman’s 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. 

SHOWING THE MIND IN MOTION

A WRITER’S 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 a 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 spontaneous uncensored news, 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 a speech, it catches our interest. For example, here are some lines from a well-known poem by Frank O’Hara 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!

O’Hara’s poem features a chatty, spontaneous speaker who is rambling along, narrating without premeditation. The poem’s lack of punctuation and the extended, breathless run-on sentence represent the stream of consciousness of the speaker’s speedy and unedited mind—the mind itself, you could say, is “trotting along.”

What makes the voice of “Poem” so appealing and memorable is the way the speaker corrects himself and his companion; the mind tumbles forward, commenting on the traffic and the weather and his upcoming meeting. “It was raining, no, it was hailing, no, it was snowing, I was in such a hurry, and suddenly . . .”; It's the voice we're paying attention to, not the story, really. O’Hara famously said that a poem was something one wrote instead of making a phone call to a friend, and his poems are true as conversational and friendly as phone calls. In “Poem” the tone of the address is familiar and intimate and unedited—you could even say careless—and the result on the page is that the reader himself feels included in the warm immediacy of the speaker’s life.

O’Hara’s poem displays how one feature of “voice” poems is a love of process, not the neatened perfection of the product. The goal of the poem is not to conceal uncertainty and to deliver an airtight argument, or proclamation, or insight, not to arrive at some truth, but rather to display the nature of the speaker’s “real-time” sensibility, including its tendency toward indecisiveness and self-contradiction. In reading a voice poem like O’Hara’s it might be said that you can feel the physical rhythm of the speaker’s breath; the poem is breathing.

Here’s another example of an American poetic speaker whose mind is “in process”; Gerald Stern’s poem “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees” displays the speaker’s perceptions changing and revising as he proceeds:

What I took to be a man in a white beard

turned out to be a woman in a silk babushka

weeping in the front seat of her car;

and what I took to be a seven-branched candelabrum

with the wax dripping over the edges

turned out to be a horse’s skull

with its teeth sticking out of the sockets.

It was my brain fooling me,

sending me false images,

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

for what I thought was a soggy newspaper

turned out to be the first Book of Concealment, written in English,

and what I thought was a grasshopper on the windshield

turned out to be the devoted Shepherd change of state blood,

and what I thought was, finally, the real hand of God

turned out to be solely a man wire and a combine of broken dark glasses.

Stern’s poem—though quite surrealist at some moments—is a catalog of perceptions and revisions. In fact, the poem, in its recounting of a long sequence of misperceptions, amounts to a description of life. Rhythmically, this litany resembles a stand-up comedian’s narrative of misfortunes and recoveries, “What I took to be . . . turned out to be . . .” and We still see what happens next, sensing it will reach disaster or revelation. Another structural detail to notice in “Blue Skies” is the progressively escalating stakes of the poem, as it lists “errors” in perception that the speaker has made. From mistaking a woman for “a man in a white beard,” the speaker progresses to mistaking a pair of broken sunglasses for “the hand of God.” The speaker is wandering through the junk of creation, but we come to understand that he is a persistent and honest seeker, and that earns our respect. This escalation in stakes could be said to be characteristic of serious poetry: a good poem intensifies, increases, and then resolves the tension. However, the main thing to notice in “Blue Skies” is the recurrent self-revising of the speaker’s mind and our consequent interest in the sensibility of this poetic voice.

Both Stern’s poem and O’Hara’s are fast-paced, but the act of poetic self-revising can also happen at a slower, more measured velocity. In Genevieve Taggard’s “The Geraniums” we can see the speaker working through a sort of puzzle—carefully, patiently adding observations and qualifications as she goes. She seems to be explaining and reasoning as much to herself as to us, her readers; her poem embodies a believable, attractive tentativeness: Even if the geraniums are artificial

Just the same,

In the rear of the Italian café

Under the nimbus of electric light

They are red; no less red

For how they were made. Above

The mirror and the napkins

In the little white pots . . .

. . . In the semi-clean café

Where they have good

Lasagne. . . . The red is a wonderful joy

Really, and so are the people

Who like and ignores it. In this place

They also have good bread.

Taggart's poem, delivered in its methodical meditative voice, is probing into a question of aesthetics: how it asks, can these red geraniums simultaneously be false and yet beautiful? What a remarkable mystery it is, the speaker marvels, that the soul finds nourishment in the modern world. And let us consider the loveliness of the humble. “Even if,” she says, “just the same,” “they are red;” “really,” she says as if persuading herself. Not only are they red, decide our speaker toward the end of the poem, as we watch her thinking: the red is “wonderful.” And then, even after arriving at her superlative judgment, she must add the rather matter-of-fact, qualifying observation that the people in the restaurant nonetheless continue to—and always will, she seems to imply—ignore the beauty right in front of them.

"Geranium" is a poem that can be depicted with quiet escalation and low evaluation. Gears and jacks of the meditation speaker are visible in small qualifying clauses of the poem, which give and take back and give again as they work their way through. The poem is a debate of checks and balances that artfully, delicately characterize the world on the evidence of this local setting. The red flowers are a wonderful joy, but the café is “semi-clean.” And, Taggart's speaker seems to be figuring out, so is the whole world. Yet in this world, too, they have “good” (not great) bread. In “The Geraniums,” we watch the speaker perceiving, thinking, “making up” her mind, and thinking some more, as the poem maintains a delicate balance of curiosity, qualification, irony, and affection. As O’Hara’s poem makes a case for the liveliness of plunging forward at a pell-mell pace, Taggart's poem makes a case for the believable grace and insight that is derived from going slow.

In each of these poems, the humanity of the speaker’s voice is created and revealed through the record of its transformations. In them, we see reflected the instability of our own ongoingly changing selves, and our affection and respect are earned by the speaker’s persistence.