The Hatred of Poet Voice

1.

How many pacts of budding friendship have been sealed, in my life, by the hatred of poet voice? I might need more than one hand to count them. I might even run out of fingers. The sheer ubiquity of poet voice casts it in the role of a kind of vocational weather. It’s more fun to complain about poet voice than it is to complain about the weather, because complaining about the weather is, the sitcoms tell us, the prerogative of sexless middle-aged suburbanites. Also because any commentary on the weather in 2020 reminds people that they are going to die, possibly much sooner than they would like. Poet voice will not kill you, although it may also sometimes conjure the specter of your own mortality.

If you would like to incorporate talking about poet voice into your social repertoire but are unsure where to begin, here are some indispensable talking points. They are non-optional. In fact, they are as inevitable as gravity.

a) Nobody likes poet voice. Nobody knows where poet voice comes from.

b) Somebody else is always doing poet voice—sometimes because they are contemptible in other ways, and at other times, inexplicably, infuriatingly, contraindicating their other fine qualities as a poet or human being. You do not do and have never done poet voice.

c) How the discussants wish that nobody would do poet voice! Perhaps schools should teach poets not to do poet voice. No dimension of your own education taught you or your peers not to do poet voice. Nobody ever presented you with any officially sanctioned alternatives. Still. Nobody likes it.

2.

I Googled “in defense of poet voice” to see what would happen, and to make sure I was covering all of my bases. My search came up with a poem called “In Defense of Poetry Voice” by David Tomas Martinez. Martinez visually arranges his lines so that, at least initially, white space mimics the measured and homogeneous quality of poet voice, the strange cadence of its pauses. He can’t visually represent what is to my mind the one great virtue of poet voice, which is that it communicates with a combination of pause and intonation where lines are broken, transforming the visual into the aural. It is, in other respects, a pretty conventional lyric poem, a recitation of similes that refer us back to poet voice as their unifying tenor. I don’t ultimately come away with a clear understanding of the poem as a defense. It stacks up a bunch of figures that prompt intense affective response—a flag, a gun, pregnant teenagers, a beloved. It culminates with “the eyes of the dead.” The poem insists by way of the sheer intensity of its imagery that poet voice really matters, but, mysteriously, maybe not on the terms offered by poetry itself, which is “only a box.” Maybe poet voice is the portal that opens our passage through the constellation of all of these radiant and significant comparisons. Maybe, as the poem says, poet voice is “like NPR.” But if so, we’re left with another puzzle: why write the poem down at all? Maybe the poem is supposed to be an approximation of a text that is meant, first and foremost, to be heard? Certainly that’s a striking reversal of the way contemporary poets (with a few exceptions) tend to subordinate sound and performance to sight and publication. An interesting implication of that reversal, however, is the identification of poet voice in particular with performance in general—or even sound, in general!

3.

In her 2016 PMLA article on poet voice, Marit MacArthur characterizes academic poetry readings—where you are most likely to encounter poet voice—as fundamentally Puritanical. She means this quite literally. Poet voice rhetorically evinces a certain sincerity by dint of its anti-theatricality, which as a negation of Catholic spectacle was and to a certain extent still is the aesthetic bedrock of Protestant religious enthusiasm. She goes on to explore some of the historical and cultural coordinates that have shaped and changed the opposition of sincerity to theatricality in performances of USian poetry. Poet voice, she makes clear, is not “neutral”, although within the setting of academic poetry readings it may appear that way (and some poets may adopt poet voice for that reason.) It is legible as a phenomenon inasmuch as it distinguishes itself from more expressivist traditions of performance—and particularly from the very differently “churchy” influence of Black Christianity. MacArthur is a careful describer, and avoids as best she can trying to attach value judgments to academic or expressivist reading styles. It seems to me that this may—speaking of style! be partly because it is unfashionable for academics to too openly evaluate the cultural objects they study, and partly because at the level of individual choice, the link of reading style to other political and aesthetic affinities tends not to hold up so well. One of her examples of an expressivist reader is Kenneth Goldsmith. MacArthur’s essay is great ideology critique, in short, but as with much ideology critique confronts us with a rather hopeless chasm between institutions and the people who comprise them.

4.

At the Q&A with the famous poet, a young person asked the famous poet how to pursue a career in poetry, as the famous poet has done. (The famous poet does not teach, as far as I know.) The famous poet said that, among other things, the young person should seek out professional training in theater. The ability to enunciate, to be heard across the room, and moreover to perform a text—to authentically inhabit a poem—these were all essential skills for a would-be poet. I admired the famous poet’s transparency about having to work.

5.

I get on Facebook to poll the poets I know. Do they use poet voice? Do they like it, or at least conditionally defend it? Are they simply resigned to it? I am determined to find some of these people who Marit MacArthur says prefer poet voice, to coax them into the light—or at least into a private conversation with me. My casual poll is admittedly circumscribed by my own aesthetic predilections, on top of the geographical and academic predicates that have formed the broad brush strokes of the poet I am. I am likelier to be cordial with poets who cut their teeth on the New York School, in particular, than I am with anybody else. I would not expect to find many hardcore ideologues of the gemlike Heideggerean word on my social media. On the other hand, as we have already seen, aesthetic predilections themselves do not correspond straightforwardly with reading habits, and I am only two degrees removed from a poet who several of the empirical studies on poet voice have mentioned as an exemplary performer of the style.

The poll yields no appreciable results, except that I am gently cautioned not to be too big of a dick about poet voice, because maybe the poets elsewhere who do poet voice can’t help it. I agree—my haphazard research has indicated that many of them probably can’t help it, not least because it is very possible that they have no idea that they’re doing it. In a group chat, venting my frustration, I say that increasingly it seems to me that trying to observe anything about poet voice at all is like going from car to car in a traffic jam, asking the drivers how they feel about the traffic. Everybody is upset or trying not to be. Inasmuch as they are upset or level-headed—inasmuch as they think anything at all about it—nobody is driving a car.

6.

The sleep-mutter of the program to itself, I write. But now we’re circling the drain of ideology critique again. Trapped between ethics and Adorno. I set out to write this piece like an artist—as poetics—rather than like a scholar. I have inevitably waffled and tried to have and eat my cake and so all I can do is back myself into the corner of the mindless, thought-crushing double bind presented to anyone who begins by choosing whether to approach something like an artist or like a scholar. This is the point in the essay where something has to change decisively.

Should I break into verse like Charles Bernstein?

Should I append a recording of my voice, improvising the rest of this thing, whatever it is I’m doing, in speech?

Should I become as obdurate as a boulder?

Should I advise? Should I please advise?

Should I quit my day job?

Should I drill down to the prefigurative kernel of poet voice?

Should the benediction of my email be “regards” or “best regards” or “best?”

7.

It turns out that what I’m really interested in is one emanation of a particular class habitus—the residue in intonation and cadence of a kind of collective paralysis and learned helplessness. It goes without saying that we can speak about the consciousness I am talking about as a set of tendencies. It is white, it has an advanced degree, it seeks a meaningful personal relationship with the work of art (as a modest correction to MacArthur, I would characterize the MFA circuit reading as being spiritual in character, rather than religious. Religion has altogether too much going for it. I don’t really think that the whole edifice of the creative writing program in the splendor of its decline is reaffirmed by the collective endurance of one more reading. Rather, masochistic “appreciation” is the means by which the atomized listener attempts to draw the edifice that impersonally punishes them close. Nearer, my God, to thee!) What has poet voice got to do with would-be radical poets who violate BDS so as not to alienate an acquaintance, for example, or of would-be radical poets who go mysteriously quiet when the distributor of their books to bookstores commits wage theft? Everything, and also nothing. Trying to understand is like chasing a ghost that can’t be traced back to a body. No one person who does poet voice is responsible for the disease of which poet voice is merely a symptom—one of the most innocuous, at that. No one person is responsible for anything. And yet, and yet, and yet!

8.

(Did anything change, really?)

Already I anticipate that this will be received as a polemic against poet voice, and I guess I have lost the fight against writing one—so what? It does not follow that I am insisting that anyone stop doing poet voice. As we have well established by now, it is a reflex, if not actually a weather system. Individually deciding not to do poet voice anymore wouldn’t change anything about poetry voice and the host of collective shortcomings it indexes, even if we all, with a miraculous surge of self-awareness, individually stopped at once. Similarly, if we all individually shot our landlords tomorrow, life might improve for awhile, but in the absence of other ways of living, we would eventually replace them with more landlords. I said to a friend that I wondered whether, looking back, we would be able to identify a certain style of poetry reading as the objective correlative of the open plan office. I was kidding, but not really. They are definitely a scourge. But you’d be forgiven for working in one.

9.

The vexed responsibility of any poet committed to changing everything is both to imagine changing everything and, in doing so, to say the same things over and over and over and over again. Perhaps the poet should seek out people, probably not poets themselves, who are trying to reinvent everyday life—which means trying to decompartmentalize it, in no small part. Turning a commitment into an entire comportment, which is always a collective undertaking. The responsibility of the committed poet is also to topple Rilke’s Apollo, and to cheerfully withstand the pressure to make anything seem easy that isn’t.