Paying Attention to Your Voice (Part 3)

Getting back to voice, the most important thing I noticed in completing my first manuscript was that subtle variations in voice can be greatly magnified in certain context. Now, mine is a narrowly focused example, because of the gimmick of the collection (poems addressed to small daughters), so perhaps I'm more paying more attention to this than is usual. But here's an example:

A draft of a poem contained this sequence:

.............................We all check one box:
clowns, bats, death, lonelieness - we all have
one thing besides sex we can’t discuss with
our mothers, or else that brainbound rush
of red will make us five again.

In a sequence addressed to a child, with a father as the narrator, the appearence of the word "sex" is a distraction. It's out of character; I know because I've successfully avoided that word for the better part of decade - except in this poem. The rewritten section is a little different:

.............................We all check one box:
clowns, bats, death, lonelieness - we all have
one thing we can’t discuss, especially with
our mothers, or else that brainbound rush
of red will make us five again.

Weaker, frankly, but more supportive of the work as a whole. Another discovery, similar to the point Jeannine made a few days ago, was that the poems written earlier in this process (when my children were younger) don't feel the same as the ones written more recently. I've gotten better at getting past the sentiment to the interesting and ironic just beyond, but more importantly, my line has shrunk.

Aside: Does this happen to other poets? The basic construct of all your poems suddenly feels wrong and you are moved to create with different music? In my case, it seems I don't think in pentameter anymore. I've looked back to see the fuzzy period where I forced my line breaks and made some bad word choices to maintain the rhythm I used to want. But in the context of the larger work, those forces jumped out at me. Some got rewritten, some extracted.

Finally, I killed off at least one poem that I like that didn't fit with the essentially light tone of the collection, or with the subset of me that the narrating father represents. To simplify, several of the poems in the manuscript refer to Christmas, all in a neutral-to-positive way, religiously. One of the later poems I'd written for this project has at its center doubt about a particular element of my Roman Catholic faith. While it may be true to me personally, it may be interesting to read, and it may be a good poem, it just isn't necessary to the exploration of emerging fatherhood or to dialog with small children. It seemed a conversation with myself instead of with them. Maybe when I write for them as teenagers, that one will have a home.

So adhering to voice as it applies to a single collection of poems boils down to this: one book is by one person. Be complicated, be surprising, but be one person. The corollary is: if you are presenting a theme, stay on that theme; sacrifice length for coherence and sacrifice your favorite poems if they call so much attention to themselves that the reader loses his or her place in the larger work.

Ah. I feel better now. All this from a prawn tweaking a tin thing's pecs. I really gotta get out more.