On a life of fearless writing

 

I've spent a lifetime writing: a diary I've kept everyday since January 1965, books, poetry, book reviews, criticism, and correspondence.  Why did I do so much writing? On one hand, I enjoy solitude and being creative. On the other hand, there were things that happened in my life that I understood better in the act of writing; writing helped me to understand something about life and expressing this in a poem was both to discover something new and to have a numinous experience.

    This writing I am talking about has to be fearless, the writer is going to a place that is marked with signs saying "No Trespassing", "Do Not Enter", and "Enter at Your Own Risk". The important things in life are not easy and they aren’t free, they are a lot of work. You may be afraid to write something down, or afraid to follow where your thinking is going, you may be inclined to censor your writing; just remember that no one else need ever read what you are writing, you can tear it up after you've written whatever you want to say, but you need to have courage and be fearless to do the writing. How could it be otherwise? Writing has to be a precise expression of what the soul has to say, what the soul perceives; this is more difficult than you might think.

    What I am saying will mean very little to most people, but this is not meant for most people, it is meant for poets. A poet wants to write an authentic poem, a poem that is authentic to what the poet wants to say, to be true to the poet's inner being, and this requires years of writing and rewriting poems. All of a poet's work can be seen as one long poem, it is the poem of one's life, continuous and unbroken. You don't just sit down one day and write something you call a poem and think that makes you a poet, there is a lot more to it than this. 

    Writing poetry is not an obsession or even a compulsion, it is that there is no alternative but to do the writing that presents itself to you; it is what one does and to do anything else is to deny the Call to do this work; if you deny the Call you have betrayed your life, betrayed your mission in life. Not even God is as important as your soul, you can live very nicely without God but if you betray your soul you will have no life at all, just confusion and denial. Don't worry, God will forgive you for not believing in Him, He doesn't need your belief, He doesn't even need you. To see life, the particulars of life, and to express them, is to communicate things of the soul and poetry is the voice of the soul. Writing is always a movement in the direction of wholeness and understanding, of creativity, of making something new. It is a triumph of formulating and expressing in an exact way the thing you want to write, it is the achievement of wholeness over division. So, at the basis of writing is finding wholeness, truth, and Oneness with life. That's how important writing is to a poet and why poets need to be fearless when writing poems.

Notes on Voice in Poetry

                      

The discovery of a poet’s voice brings an authenticity to the poet’s work, that the poet’s voice communicates the content of the poem as well as the poet’s inner being, his or her soul. Voice in poetry is the expression of the soul.

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It isn’t the sound of your voice or how well you read a poem out loud that is voice. It isn’t a poem for several voices. It isn’t slam poetry or performance poetry. It’s the essence of who you are as it is expressed in the way you write, your own original distinctive individual voice.

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Voice in poetry, to be authentic, must be true to the self of the poet, to the inner, subjective, self-perception of the poet. The voice has to be authentic and true to the poet’s inner perception. Voice has to be an expression of the authentic self, not the self covered over with falsehood and conceit.

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The point is to discover one’s voice, and then you continue writing and voice changes in what one writes, but the discovery of one’s authentic voice is a border one needs to cross in order to write the work that follows, work that one can stand behind, that gives one the self-assurance to expresses one’s vision. 

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Voice is a vehicle for the content of poetry, but it is also inseparable from poetry; content expands when an authentic voice is discovered. Voice is not style, style changes but voice is the expression of the inner, psychological dimension of the poet; voice is the expression of psyche. The expression of voice changes just as our actual voice changes with age, but once an authentic voice is discovered then voice will remain authentic to the poet, no matter what the poet is saying.

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There is no way to find one’s voice, it must be discovered by the poet, but not all poets find their voice in poetry; however, after voice is discovered the person writing poems is a real poet, not someone who also happens to write poems. If someone who writes poems never finds his voice, he is not a poet. How can he be when writing poetry is predicated on writing from an authentic voice? This does not diminish what a poet writes before the discovery of voice, in some way voice might exist as a precursor to the discovery of the poet’s authentic voice, or at least the reader can see the potential for the birth of voice in the early work.

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First, you have to be born a poet and realize you are a poet by writing poetry, then you have to put in your 10,000 hours of apprenticeship. There’s nothing romantic or fun about it. It’s a lot of hard work to be a poet and as you get older it gets harder and harder, not because of writing poems but because of all the pother work that comes with writing and building a body of work; for instance, organizing and placing your archives, working on your selected poems, writing criticism, keeping up correspondence, managing what you have created a lifetime building, and so on.

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Voice is the expression of the poet’s integrity as a poet. Voice is the expression of the poet’s character, sensibility, and integrity as a human being. This is why it has such importance to poets.

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Discovering one’s voice does not disqualify or negate what the poet wrote before this discovery, but it is a signifier of the poet’s maturity as a poet. 

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Voice is when we speak from the heart, from the soul, without pretention or affectation, but honestly without censoring ourselves, with only one conviction, to be true to our inner necessity, to what we have to say (not what we want to say or should say, or think we should say) but abandoning these things of the self, to speak from the real and authentic self, not the layers of self, but from the heart, with honesty, and from the soul.

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The genesis of both the content of the work and the voice expressing the work are simultaneous, they can’t be separated. They are the same process. The work is written in the voice as the voice is discovered and as the work is written.

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Voice in poetry is not one’s “style” of writing; style may be narrative, minimal, visual poetry, or what have you. Voice is access to psyche from which poems are written. If a poet hasn’t discovered his “voice” he hasn’t become a poet.

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A poet can’t “search for a voice”, but all poets need to find their voice. Voice comes to the poet, it isn’t something you can “find”. Voice is the expression of the poet’s psyche, the congruence of events that allow the poem to authentically express the inner, spiritual and psychological, being of the poet.

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