Voice|Voices
Mark Scroggins
I dislike my voice—its
thinness, its high-pitched reediness, its occasional strange inflections. When
I was a small child, my Kentucky school district sent me to a speech therapist for
a few months to iron out some defect in my enunciation. Part of the treatment
involved recording and listening to myself talk on a cassette. The sound of my
own voice horrified, humiliated, and embarrassed me. To some extent, it does so
to this day.
I never wanted
to “find my voice” in poetry, but rather to escape my physical voice. The
voices of the poets I admire are always in my ears, utterly distinct one from
another, each as immediately recognizable as a few bars from a great
improvising musician or a passage of brushwork from a beloved painting. But I
never aspired to attain a consistent voice—though I’ve always believed that
poetry was an affair first and foremost of voices.
Of course,
“voice” in a printed poem—rather than an audio recording—is a metaphor. It’s
not a literal sound, but a congeries of diction, characteristic rhythms and
turns of phrase, habits of combining word-sounds in particular ways. Even when
they are each writing blank verse, one never mistakes the voice of Tennyson for
that of Swinburne; one knows Mina Loy’s free verse from that of William Carlos
Williams as much by its sound as by its subject.
As I write, I
don’t imagine myself speaking my poems to an audience, though I do sound each
passage in my head, repeatedly. They come in brief bits—lines and stanzas,
sometimes groups of a dozen or more lines. I try to write to some kind of
“tune,” however atonal. Only very rarely do I have any idea of where I’m going,
or where in the poem a given passage might eventually fall. “I” almost never
speaks: instead, I imagine voices who might be saying the lines, voices whose
power, resonance, or tenderness of address surpasses what my own voice might
muster. Or voices whose anger, affection, resentment, or sense of hurt far outreaches
what I’m conscious of feeling. Bureaucratic voices, voices overheard on the
streets or in the subways, voices of friends or loved ones.
I have no set
schedule or routine for working at my poems. Old enough to remember the
typewriter, a fetishist of fountain pens, I resist keying my words into electronic
documents: somehow it “freezes” them, makes them resistant to further
alteration. I jot down lines in notebooks when they occur to me, add to them
when it seems they have something more they want to say. I copy them over,
adjusting, cutting, adding, from notebook to notebook and back again. I gather
little bundles of them, hoarding them against a dry spell. I try to hear the
echoes between disparate passages, the potential counterpointing.
These fragments
eventually fall into clusters, are stitched or soldered into poems: “He do the
police in different voices”—which sounds pretty familiar. It’s patchwork, or
collage, or bricolage, or simply a heap of things that make a shape or gesture
that feels comely to me, or interestingly awkward. My poems speak for no one,
least of all myself, but I suppose no one else can take responsibility for
them. Hier stehe; ich kann nicht anders.
Mark Scroggins is the author of four books of poems: Anarchy, Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles, Red Arcadia, and Pressure
Dressing. His most recent collection of criticism is The Mathematical Sublime: Writing about Poetry, and he has recently
edited Our Lady of Pain: Poems of Eros
and Perversion by Algernon Charles Swinburne. He writes regularly for Hyperallergic.
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Finally got to this some months late. Damned fine piece, well thought over many years--sharp, but not glib. I like the concentration on voice, and the curious story of Mark's childhood trauma about his own, personal voice. He's dead right to point out that one's voice in poetry is not personal, but rather a strangely public sound, or persona. And of course it is not altogether one's own voice, but comes willy nilly from where it will. I was surprised by Mark's dislike for composing on the computer. I am most happy when, should a poem come my way, to sit down immediately at the computer and brang it out--for me the computer is totally forgiving, totally at my will ready to make changes. Of course I can see the preference for a notebook and pen. But there is something a tad indelible about the fact of print and I prefer the electronic implication of ephemerality. Each to his/her own!
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