On teaching voice

In preparing to teach at the Rutgers-Camden conference tomorrow, I think about voice.  What makes for music, and why it matters.  What yields momentum, and what strips it.  We'll be looking, among other things, at authors whose work spans nonfiction, fiction, and perhaps poetry.  What do they carry forward, in each genre?  What do they own?  How have they left their tonal mark?

We must, as Robert Pinsky, says, learn "to hear language in a more conscious way."

If we can't, we are not writers.  We tell stories, only.

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What is it for?

And so we turn (when we're stuck; when we're not certain of why we push so hard against a discipline, a form; when we need a shakedowntalkingto, a goading forward) to those so much wiser than ourselves, and read familiar passages newly.

Today I leafed through the essential Pinsky book and came upon these words:

"I presume that the technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individual life span; to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to express feelings and ideas rapidly and memorably. To share those feelings and ideas with companions, and also with the dead and with those to come after us."

Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry

Poetry, then, like a tree holding its own inside the wind.

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