Finding one’s voice in poetry

4 October 2024

All poets need to find their voice, this requires talent, perseverance, and commitment to writing. From when I began writing poetry, in 1965, I knew I had to find my voice, I knew I had to write poems that I could stand behind --poems that were true to my inner self-- and those poems would accurately express the experiences that had formed or created my life. For me, the discovery of my voice in poetry was an important development in my work as a poet; I knew this instinctively, and I spent years writing every night until I finally wrote a "real" poem. 

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The journey to being a poet includes writing, study, reading, and having a few poet friends; it's a journey in that you don't know where you are going until you get there, and you never know if you will write a genuine poem until you write one. Discovering my voice in poetry was a breakthrough in my writing. In my early twenties I had written poems, for instance “there are seashells and cats”, and this was my true voice. This discovery of my true voice is shown in the poems in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press,1978); these were my first poems that I felt were genuine poems, poems that I could stand behind. Finding one's voice in poetry doesn't mean that you will stay writing the same way, what you say changes and how you say it changes, but that is only after you find your voice; another important poem, in my body of work, is “Divisions”, it was written over three days in April 1977.

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Writing Divisions (Coach House Press, 1983) happened during a period of emotional conflict, of unhappiness, of catharsis. Did Matthew Arnold say that poetry is our religion? This is a shared experience between poet and reader because the poet gives expression to spirit, soul, and psyche and the reader recognizes these important qualities in themselves. What one says in poetry changes as one gets older; nothing is permanent and content is also subject to change, but there is an ineffable quality to voice that doesn’t change; voice is the vehicle for the human soul and what it is experiencing, observing, and moved by, this becomes content, and it needs to be true to one’s inner being.

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November 2012 – June 2013

Revised October 2024

Montreal

"Growing Old" by Matthew Arnold

 

2024

What is it to grow old?

Is it to lose the glory of the form,

The luster of the eye?

Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?

—Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—

Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?

Is it to feel each limb

Grow stiffer, every function less exact,

Each nerve more loosely strung?

Yes, this, and more; but not

Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be!

’Tis not to have our life

Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow,

A golden day’s decline.

’Tis not to see the world

As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,

And heart profoundly stirred;

And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,

The years that are no more.

It is to spend long days

And not once feel that we were ever young;

It is to add, immured

In the hot prison of the present, month

To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,

And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.

Deep in our hidden heart

Festers the dull remembrance of a change,

But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—

When we are frozen up within, and quite

The phantom of ourselves,

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost

Which blamed the living man.

"Lines Written in Kensington Gardens" by Matthew Arnold

 

In this lone, open glade I lie,
Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
And at its end, to stay the eye,
Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-trees stand!

Birds here make song, each bird has his,
Across the girdling city's hum.
How green under the boughs it is!
How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!

Sometimes a child will cross the glade
To take his nurse his broken toy;
Sometimes a thrush flit overhead
Deep in her unknown day's employ.

Here at my feet what wonders pass,
What endless, active life is here!
What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear.

Scarce fresher is the mountain-sod
Where the tired angler lies, stretch'd out,
And, eased of basket and of rod,
Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout.

In the huge world, which roars hard by,
Be others happy if they can!
But in my helpless cradle I
Was breathed on by the rural Pan.

I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd,
Think often, as I hear them rave,
That peace has left the upper world
And now keeps only in the grave.

Yet here is peace for ever new!
When I who watch them am away,
Still all things in this glade go through
The changes of their quiet day.

Then to their happy rest they pass!
The flowers up close, the birds are fed,
The night comes down upon the grass,
The child sleeps warmly in his bed.

Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.

The will to neither strive nor cry,
The power to feel with others give!
Calm, calm me more! nor let me die
Before I have begun to live.