Things Fall Apart
by and published in Edition Three of Pomegranate
So here’s a joke which is only funny if you’re a poet:
Poet 1: (sneezes)
Poet 2: Are you all right?
Poet 1: I’ve almost lost my voice.
Poet 2: Don’t worry, you’ll find it in your third collection. *
People seem to make quite a lot of fuss about this concept of poetic voice – how do you find it, how do you know you’ve found it, what do you do with it once you’ve got it, how do you define it? It seems to be the ultimate in critical praise – ‘In X collection, writer Y has truly found their voice’ – which makes finding it presumably an important part of a young poet’s mission. In fact maybe that’s what we should all be doing – writing, writing, writing, all with the aim of eventually finding our own true ‘voices’ in which we will be able to create the finest poetry of which we are capable, probably around about the same time as we publish our third collection.
You know, I don’t like that idea.
Why should we be writing towards some distant future finishing point? Is this a race? Was there a starting point? Frankly, the whole concept of ‘voice’ strikes me as lazy, a fuzzy piece of critical shorthand for ‘original’ and ‘interesting’ and ‘personal’, wrapped up in a near-mysticism which smacks of artistic self-congratulation – look at me, I can tell which poets have voice and which ones don’t! Aren’t I clever! Understand that I’m not attacking some amorphous concept of ‘critics’ here: the poetry world is so small that we actually mostly criticise each other, and so it’s poets who do this, poets who talk reverentially about voice, poets who award the meaningless accolade of ‘found’. This is nothing less than lazy reading. What, you can tell that all these poems were written by the same poet? Well, bravo, but what about the poems?
You see, I’m against voice. I’m against having one, I’m against keeping to one, I’m definitely against going looking for one: because describing a collection as showing ‘voice’ is lazy reading, but willingly keeping to one voice within your own work strikes me as the much greater sin of lazy writing. Not only lazy writing, but thoughtless writing: writing that is self-absorbed, focused inwards, unconnected to the world. After all, everyone, in the end, has their own voice: it’s the one you can hear your own thoughts in as you’re falling asleep. And even that’s not the whole story. Sure, you have the voice you talk to yourself in, but what about the voice you talk to your family in? Is that the same as the one you use for your friends? And in these internet days, when it’s so very easy to keep in touch with people you don’t see day-to-day anymore, it’s possible to have several completely separate groups of friends as well – mine currently fall into three broad groups of poets and school people and college people. Are you the same person for all of them? How about in ‘the real world’? Who are you for your teachers or your superiors? Who are you for the people you have authority over?
If I had to describe what life in the twenty-first century is like to a passing time-traveler, I’d call it multiple. Different media are everywhere, blaring a hundred thousand different messages that reach our ears as a dizzy mess of thoughts and fashions and brands. The world wants us to know that iPod and iTunes are meant to be together like attractive models making out, that McDonalds eaters everywhere are lovin’ it, that you should just do it, that property prices are rising or falling again, that all right-thinking people hate the Iraq war and George Bush, that all right-thinking people hate immigrants and gays, that Elton John went to a party last night and that people are starving in Africa, that shares in X company rose point three percent the other day and that this is the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah and that that was My Chemical Romance with Teenagers and that COMING SOON from New Line studios and that A-levels are being devalued and that A-levels are just fine and that you should look both ways before crossing the road…
‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’, said Yeats.** It’s already happened. Where would you put the centre of modern life? Of your life? Is there a faith, a leader, an ideal, that links everything? Is there a centre for all of us? I can’t think of one. Our lives have no one place to settle: the parts are disconnected, impossible to pinpoint, like a cloud of electrons without the nucleus. Options are blasted at us from every angle. And poetry is life distilled, said Gwendolyn Brooks, and life has a thousand voices, and we have thousands of voices of our own in order to deal with it.
So why should we limit ourselves to only writing in one? I say: write in every voice you know, and some you don’t. Experiment. Vary. Enjoy. In the words of Louis MacNeice:
‘World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.’
If you do stumble into a voice, enjoy it for a while. Then stumble out again. Ours is a world where nothing stays the same for very long: trap yourself in one spot, and you’ll only be left behind.
_
*I am sorry to say that this exchange actually happened. Poets 1 & 2 were played by Charlotte Geater and Richard O’Brien.
**pace Isobel Norris. I maintain that The Second Coming is one of those poems everyone needs to have to hand once in a while.
Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh is first mate to Char’s captain and the oldest member of the team. As befits someone of such advanced years, she likes very old poetry e.g. Ovid, Catullus, Sappho and Homer, although she has been known to read poems written as recently as 1963. She therefore had no choice but to study Classics, which she is doing at Trinity College, Cambridge. Emily is a Londoner and her poetry has been published in Mimesis and Magma. She also designed the Pomegranate logo.