Abstract
What do we mean by ‘voice’ in poetry? Given the sheer diversity, and ambivalence, of poems’ understandings, deployments, explorations of voice, their strategies of voicing, as well as the roles played by voice as trope, as prosodic resource, as ideology, so categorical a question could easily seem self-defeating. Phrasing the question thus, moreover, takes its ‘we’ to be unproblematic, not to mention assuming some stable entity called ‘poetry’ — and all this simply in order to raise the question of ‘voice’. But then again, asking about voice might, for this very reason, bring this ‘we’ into focus, might offer up a conception of ‘poetry’ that can comprehend practices as various as those of Paul Celan, Henri Chopin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lisa Robertson, William Shakespeare; and, reciprocally, opening ourselves to the kinds of thinking these poems render possible, and indeed exact of us, might provide a starting point from which to reflect on the category of voice itself.
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Notes
On the relation between concept and word, see Peter de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 19–25. De Bolla suggests (p. 22) that a conceptual formation would permit comprehension of an individual notion, rather than necessarily designating this notion.
Roland Greene et. al, (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 1525. The entry is written by Eleanor Richards.
Alex Preminger, T.V.F. Brogan and F.J. Warnke (eds.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 1366. This entry is from Fabian Guldas with Michael Davidson.
Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Vox Clamans in deserto’, trans. Nathalia King, in The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 234–47, p. 235.
Bob Perelman, ‘The First Person,’ Hills 6/7 (1980), pp. 147–65, p. 156.
Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays, 1974–1985 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986), pp. 406–07. Although his resistance to ‘voice’ does not stop him advocating sound poems’ exploration of ‘vocalizations related to the human breath’ (pp. 44–45). Again, the either/or of speechsound and persona, literal and metaphorical.
Vanessa Place and Ron Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2009), pp. 13–58, p. 47. Similarly, Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, in their introduction to Against Expression, tell us: ‘Instead of the rhetoric of natural expression, individual style, or voice, the anthology sought impersonal procedure.’
Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), p. xliii. Here the interpretation of ‘voice’ seems quite consistent with T.S. Eliot’s distinction between ‘three voices of poetry’: ‘The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself — or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character’ (The Three Voices of Poetry’ (1949), in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), p. 96). Eliot’s elision of voice and speech at this juncture is all the more disturbing given the polyphonic texture of works like The Waste Land decades earlier.
Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 259–422, p. 298. See also Michael Eskin, ‘Bakhtin on Poetry’, Poetics Today 21:2 (2000), pp. 379–91, p. 380. Eskin aims to salvage poetry from this fate as the monologic discourse par excellence; yet his solution to this, ‘the prosaicization of poetry’ (p. 387), seems a rather heavy price for poetry to pay.
Paul de Man, ‘Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory’, in Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (eds.), Lyric Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 55–72, p. 55, my italics.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Dialangues: entretien avec Anne Berger’, in Points de suspension (Paris: Galilée, 1992), p. 150. My italics.
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserl’s theory of signs trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). In 2011 a second translation of La voix et le phénomène was published, by Leonard Lawlor, also by Northwestern University Press, entitled Voice and Phenomenon. All citations are to this second translation, even if there remains the sense of a stable door being somewhat belatedly closed.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 207.
Michel de Certeau, ‘Vocal Utopias: Glossolalia’ trans. Daniel Rosenberg, Representations 56:1 (1995), pp. 29–47, p. 39.
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 130.
Alice Lagaay, ‘Between Sound and Silence: Voice in the History of Psychoanalysis’, e-pisteme 1:1 (2008), pp. 53–62, p. 60.
Fernando Poyatos, Paralanguage (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1993), p. 130.
Émile Benveniste, ‘The Levels of Linguistic Analysis,’ in Problems of General Linguistics vol. I trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 101–11, p. 109–10.
Yuri Tynianov, Problems of Verse Language trans. Michael Sosa and Brett Harvey (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), p. 49.
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Smith, D.N. (2015). Introduction Voice in Poetry: Opening up a Concept. In: On Voice in Poetry. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137308238_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137308238_1
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