Find Your Own Voice
The title for this column comes from a musician of profound ability and charisma, Amit Peled.
Mr. Peled is professor of music at The Peabody Conservatory of Music, at John Hopkins University. As a teacher, Mr. Peled believes in ‘the nature of nurture.’ Ah! If only I had started cello with a teacher like this.
I did begin my poetry study with a teacher like Amit Peled. My teacher was Jim Moore. I worked with him for four years in St. Paul, Minnesota. Jim and I first met at Cafe Con Amore. (My husband wondered if we couldn’t meet somewhere else.) I had mailed ten poems to Jim.
When we met he placed the pages on the table next to my latte, and said, “This is really poetry.” I could have swooned, slipped under the table and kissed his feet. Instead I glowed, gleamed, held back tears. I had been writing since I was sixteen years old, and other than my mother, no one had praised my work like this. Jim Moore said more than once, “Let your authentic voice speak.”
I search for my authentic voice in music and words. If my cello could speak, it would do so with a magnolia-laced Virginia accent underlying an Italian opera. (My cello speaks Italian.) Fuse the two, and you have “Un Bel Di,” an aria from Madame Butterfly, sung beneath luscious live oaks, heat and humidity dreaming you to sleep.
When one of my MFA professors in St. Paul read my work aloud, a classmate would announce, “That’s Carol’s!” I can’t hide the real me or my voice.
Every one of us has an authentic voice. Read your poetry out loud. Revise for sound. (I can’t stop thinking about the sound of words, the subject of my February column.) Presently I’m reading Ron Rash and Charles Wright. I learn language from them. I don’t copy them, but search for words that are mine, hoping to connect with readers.
I love hearing poets read their work. When words come alive, jump from the page and dance around the room, that’s poetry!
The final verse of Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold follows. I wish I could have heard him say these words.
from Dover Beach
. . . Ah, love, let us be true
to one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
~ Matthew Arnold
There are readings near you. There will be someone spilling their voice in your neighborhood. Check UNCA’s Great Smokies Writing Program (agc.unca.edu/great-smokies-writing-program), Malaprops (www.malaprops.com/event), Warren Wilson College (www.themfaprogramforwritersatwarrenwilsoncollege.com), or a bookstore near you.
I will read from my book, Behind the Cello, and bring my oldest dearest friend (my cello) to several locations. I always have my cello with me because he likes poetry. He also likes to sing.
• Thursday, March 20 between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. at The Renaissance Hotel, 31 Woodfin St., downtown Asheville.
• Friday, April 11 at 2 p.m. at the Hendersonville library, 301 N. Washington St.
• Sunday, May 11 at 3 p.m. at the Music Academy in Hendersonville, 235 Duncan Hill Rd.
My reading at the Hendersonville library will be accompanied by a slide show of nature photographs by Ruth Rosauer. Words and image are fused into a sensual landscape of collages and slide shows. We call our collaboration, Poemscapes.
Resources
-The Golden Treasure of Songs and Lyrics edited by Francis T. Palgrave.
-Peabody Magazine, Spring 2014.