Fingerprints
“Writers need to understand the distinction between wanting to be published and what they really want. Publication is a means to an end. And the end is being read.” ~ Jennifer Noel, from Poets and Writers magazine, March/April 2015
When we write poetry, we leave verbal fingerprints behind.
The Voice of the poem identifies us. When Robert Frost wrote, “Sound is the gold in the ore,” he was writing about voice.
Voice identifies, etches indelibly, stamps, and inscribes. Our words make us present for readers today, and the future. In an essay from Poets and Writers (March/April), publisher, Jennifer Noel remarks, “Publication is a means to an end. And the end is being read.” I agree. Nothing pleases me more than to know someone has read my work. : )
Poems are the “glue” that cement me to the past, and connect me to the future. (I give Tracey K. Smith credit for this idea – again from Poet’s and Writers magazine.)
“The sound of the author’s voice resurrects the poet. The force of a poem is empowered by the voice behind the poem.” These are two thoughts from Poetry Speaks, a volume containing poems – you can listen to the poets reading on an accompanying CD.
I lost my voice for eight years. My first mother-in-law, a Yankee (bless her heart) decided I sounded ignorant. (I was born in Richmond, Virginia.) She insisted that her son, my new husband, rid me of my “awful accent.” Husband managed an opera company, taught diction, considered himself “a singer,” (at least he wasn’t a tenor). With his guidance, I learned to speak “correctly.” You’ll be glad to know that when I decided to figure out where Carol had gone, my voice found me. I declare, my Southern accent hasn’t deserted me since. I wallow in it.
In this dream the typewriter
is a piano and I play
with unplanned accuracy and
such fluency you would think
I was a Southerner whose tradition
recommended continues telling.
~ from “In This Dream” by Grace Paley
I received my MFA from Hamline University, in St. Paul, Minnesota. When the professor or another student read my poetry, the class would nod and say, “That’s Carol’s.” At first I thought they could hear my Southern accent, but it wasn’t my accent. It was word choice, syntax, details – “voice.”
I consider poets I can’t do without – they contain multitudes. Here’s a short list: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, lucille clifton, Basho, Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, William Shakespeare, Bill Holm, Jane Hirshfield, William Butler Yeats, both Brownings, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emily Dickinson, H.D., William Stafford, and Bill Holm… for starters. Voice distinguishes them.
This quote opens Mary Oliver’s, A Poetry Handbook. It is by Basho (1644 – 94), translated by Robert Bly (the one who kisses books).
The temple bell stops –
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
In a chapter on Sound, Mary writes, “To make a poem, we must make sounds. Not random sounds but chosen sounds.” She continues with a selection from a textbook of grammar published in 1860 which divides the alphabet into categories: vowels, consonants, semivowels and mutes – poet’s tools. She writes that poets select words for sound as well as meaning. (We knew this, right?) Mary continues with devices of sound: alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia.
I am dazzled by details. Not only do they identify poets, they place them on the map. Mary Oliver has left New England, and moved to Florida! How will this change her words? She will continue to pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. In A Poetry Handbook, she writes, “Poems are not language, but the content of the language.” And for advice: “Good poems are the best teachers.”
I taught music history at the University of Wisconsin in River Falls. Most of my students grew up on farms. I played Bach for them. I played Mozart, Handel, and the hinge in music history, Beethoven. Every class listened to the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. One of my students returned from a weekend and told me he’d played the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony for his parents. His mother said, “I’m going to listen to this every day for the rest of my life.” I admit to quoting poets in class, good stuff, the Beethoven and Brahms of the poetry world.
For children, grandchildren, and friends, memorize a favorite poem. Say it aloud for yourself. Share it. You never know whose life you will change.
Write on!
Advice
Someone dancing inside us
has learned only a few steps:
the “Do-Your-Work” in 4/4/ time,
the “What-Do-You-Expect” Waltz.
He hasn’t noticed yet the woman
standing away from the lamp,
the one with black eyes
who knows the rumba
and strange steps in jumpy rhythms
from the mountains of Bulgaria.
If they dance together,
something unexpected will happen;
if they don’t the next world
will be a lot like this one.
~ by Bill Holm
References
- Poetry Speaks, edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah P. Mosby
- Singing School: Learning to Write (and read) Poetry by Studying the Masters, Robert Pinsky
- A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver
- Poets and Writer’s magazine, March/April 2015