Voice: Lost? Forgotten? Changing?

66º ~ edging toward fall, squirrels racing about with nuts to bury, no hummingbirds this morning...are they migrated and gone? -- oh wait, one just flirted by


Today, I'm consumed with the idea of poetic voice.

In grad school, lo those many years ago now, I remember the moment I was said to have "found my voice." It was when I began writing the poems that would become Blood Almanac. It was when my poems might still have held some imitative quality of the writers I admired, but had finally grown into their own skin, their own obsessions, their own range on the page.

That voice, obsessed with the Midwest, prone to mid-length lines and shortish poems, enthralled by music and sound within the line, held up for almost 10 years, into the poems of The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths. Then, with The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, the voice became "skewed" by persona. The sickly speaker had her own pace, her own Victorian-esque and baroque sensibility, and there is very little of the Midwest in her book.

Now, I'm out in the dark again, searching for "my voice." Yes, I wrote some "angry sister" poems, which were persona (and different from the sickly speaker), but by and large, I am not gripped by any obsession at the moment. I have no fire in my belly and no sense of the line on the page.

But, today, with my BIC, a draft came calling. It is plainspoken and direct. The lines are shorter than those with which I'm most comfortable. There's very little magic realism, fairy tale, or high imagination at all. In fact, the subject is about being "unhaunted." I was reading a poem from Anna Journey's If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, a book filled with the speaker being haunted by the departed, and haunted in that lush Southern way, when this draft of mine arrived.

This draft, "The Long Unspoken," comes out and it's all about how being "unhaunted" is a failing on the speaker's part, which seems to me to be directly about my feelings on voice, passion, and "inspiration" at this moment. I am "un" and it is a failing.

No worries. I know this will pass and that the BIC system will work itself out. In the meantime, I continue to read, both poetry and non-fiction. I continue to open myself to the possibilities and whatever new version of my own voice is coming next.