Are You Your Voice or Is Your Voice You?
Hooray for yours truly, who’s been accepted to an elite grad school in the northeast and leaves his family’s Louisiana farm to board a train with a single suitcase in one hand and a brand-new Smith Corona Selectric typewriter in the other.
When he arrives, he’s looking around for a cab stand when he hears a crack and looks down to see that his typewriter has fallen out of the case he’s still holding and is now in pieces on the sidewalk, but who cares? He’s in the big leagues now.
The next day, he finds himself in the office of Polly, his new department’s secretary, and when she asks him to sign some documents, he says,“Do you have a pen?”
Polly says, “Excuse me?” and he says, “A pen” and mimes writing: “You know, a pen, so I can sign these papers, and she looks baffled and says, “A pin? I don’t understand. You can’t sign papers with a pin.”
Baffled himself, the young man who was me in those days says, “But—what should I use? Don’t you want me to use a pen?” and Polly laughs and says, “Oh, you want a pen! Why didn’t you say so? You keep saying ‘pin’!”
Which brings us to the question, are you your voice or is your voice you? To some degree the two are interchangeable: if you were born in the South, as I was, you will almost certainly have some version of Southern Voice, though there are many other voices that are based on something other than regionalism.
There’s Newscaster’s Voice, for example, with its butter-smooth elisions, a subset of which is National Public Radio or Podcast Voice, the pregnant pauses and off-kilter pronunciations of which are a direct response to the newscaster’s irritatingly glabrous glide from noun to verb, verb to object, object to new noun, all at 35 miles per hour, no stops till we get there.
There’s White Liberal Voice, which sounds like the voice of a camp counselor with shorts and a whistle around his neck explaining how we’re all reasonable and good or can be if we just try harder.
There’s Professor Voice or the Voice of Monotonous Incantation which stems from the faculty’s secret envy of religious ritual, their distaste for the theatrical, and a preference for the suppression rather than the expression of emotion.
Then there’s Cop Voice. Anyone who has heard an officer say, “Sir, would you put your hands where I can see them?” knows about Cop Voice!
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In the month following my chastisement by Polly the departmental secretary, I must have said, “Pen! Pen!” to myself a thousand times, even though I didn’t even come close to sounding like the guy who was popping off in the transit lounge at my local airport
recently because he’d gotten the once-over by a TSA agent with an accent.
Thing is, the guy pronounced it as “a nack-SEE-yunt” as though he himself didn’t sound as though his voice coach was the drive-thru at KFC.
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Speaking of which, when you get to the movies, all bets are off.
Like me, do you remember watching A Streetcar Named Desire and wondering if Marlon Brando was a human being like yourself or someone who’d fallen out of the hatch of a space ship from another planet and landed on the set of a Hollywood movie?
Then there’s what’s called Mid-Atlantic Accent, which you can hear in the voices of Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Katherine Hepburn, and which is so called because it seems to come from a country that doesn’t exist, a land situated halfway between England and New England.
In that mythic land, glottal stops are forbidden, “r” sounds are dropped, the “agh” sound of “chance” and other similar words is halfway between the American “agh” and the British “ah,” where all “t” sounds are precisely enunciated so that “butter” is not “budder” and “daughter” is never “dawder.”
Also, words beginning in “wh” are barked out with a guttural hack so that “what?” sounds more like “kkkkhhhhWOT?”
Some authorities blame silent film actress Clara Bow for Mid-Atlantic Accent. Bow was one of the era’s biggest stars, a master of exaggerated expressions. When the talkies came along, audiences heard her voice for the first time and it was a nasal, honking Brooklyn accent.
Clara Bow’s career took a nose dive, and new actors got the message: don’t sound like anybody. Sound like nobody.
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So if, like me, you think everybody is trying to sound like everybody else, you can blame Hollywood.
But you can also blame snobs.
In the 1800s, rich people in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia began to develop prestigious private schools on a vaguely British model, and those schools had elocution classes where students were taught to speak in a certain way: aristocratic, excessively proper, not regionally specific.
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I had a student once named Giovanni Esposito who grew up in South Philly in the nineteen fifties, so you can imagine how he sounded.
Giovanni used to call me “Doc.” Actually, he used to call me “Hey, Doc,” as in “Hey, Doc, what do you think of dis poem?” and “Hey, Doc, okay if I turn my papuh in late?” and finally “Is there some kinda clinic I can go to so I don’t tawk dis way no moah?”
“Giovanni!” I wanted to say to him. “This is America! The people aren’t all the same, and neither are the poets, though a lot of them seem to think they are.Speak up, damn it! Sound like yourself. Say ‘pin’ for ‘pen’, if you want to, ‘tawk’ for ‘talk.’”
“Walt Whitman himself says, ‘I have found that no word spoken, but is beautiful / in its place and whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or / her I shall follow / As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, / anywhere around the globe.’”
Instead I said, “Giovanni! I’ll kill you if you do that! We need more people in this world who talk the way that you do, not fewer!”
❧
Not long back an editor asked me for some poems and took one and then asked me to think about making three fairly good-sized changes.
I thought it over and took two of his suggestions and gave my reasons for not taking the third, and then I sent the new version back, thanking him and agreeing that, yes, the revised poem was an improvement on the original.
So then the editor writes me back and suggests an additional fourteen changes, all small, but each of which snipped away at the little idiosyncrasies that amount to my way of talking and writing—my voice, as it were.
Had I made the changes he suggested, my voice would have become Generic Poet Voice, become cool to the touch and non-committal, sort of like that “maybe” button on invitations these days, the one that says, “I’m not very excited about this, so let me see if anything better pops up, and if it doesn’t, I might come to your party, but if I do, don’t expect me to bring a bottle of wine or a six-pack.”
Still, it was obvious that this editor had obviously put a lot of work into both his first and second responses, so I wrote a very polite note, thanking him for the opportunity and withdrawing my poem and explaining why.
That was a month ago. Haven’t heard anything since.
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Big Shot
Want to be one? Who doesn’t. No less an authority
than former US president John Adams says “I believe
there is no one principle which predominates
in human nature so much . . . as this Passion for Superiority.”
Everybody wants to be superior, says Adams, be they old
or young, male or female, black or white, rich or poor.
Worse, every human being compares itself to “every other
round about it,” he says, “and will find some superiority
over every other real or imaginary, or it will die of grief
and vexation.” And there’s no end to it: as soon as
we convince ourselves of our superiority over someone,
someone else comes along who is demonstrably superior
to us, and so it goes, ad infinitum, also ad nauseam,
and in this way are we doomed to die of grief and vexation
unless we can somehow figure out how to become the biggest
big shot ever, a dominating figure like the Buddha, say,
or Confucius, Socrates, Jesus, Muhammad. President Adams doesn’t tell us
how to do that, but I can. It’s easy: just don’t write down
anything. They didn’t. It was their disciples who recorded
their sayings and embroidered them with what was
remembered of their lives or simply made up. Another way
to put it is that Socrates and these others were lucky.
You know who else was lucky? Primo Levi, that’s who.
When the Germans captured Levi and sent him to Auschwitz, he met a guy
named Alberto Dalla Volta. The two men became inseparable
and made a pact to share everything they had, including
the soup that a civilian worker smuggled to Levi every day
and that he shared with Alberto; as you can imagine,
this agreement to aid another man was an action rare
in the camps and probably was even more important
to Levi’s mental health than to his physical well-being.
Then there’s Patrick “Patsy” Nero of North Plainfield,
New Jersey, who was a tower operator in 1944-45
in Burma where he had to land bombers and fighter planes
in the jungle while being shot at by Japanese snipers hidden
in the tops of palms trees. In the night they’d have to
abandon the airstrip, in the morning retake it, land
and refuel aircraft, and then repeat the same thing
the next day. One time the operator only a few feet away
from him in that tower got his brains blown out by a sniper,
but Patsy had to stay on the radio to guide the bombers in.
Lucky for Patsy’s comrades, huh? Lucky for the Pacific
Theater, for all the allies, for the entire free world:
were it not for the Patsy Neros out there, we might all
be speaking Japanese now or German or both.
For the rest of us, luck is more a matter of having good parents
or a good boss. The English say “Bob’s your uncle,” meaning
something like “there it is” or “there you have it,”
which phrase is attributed to soldiers under the command
of Lieutenant-General Frederick Roberts during
the Anglo-Afghan war of 1878 and to whom their commander
was so kind that when things worked out, which they did
as long as you weren’t killed or wounded, the men would say
“Bob’s your uncle.” Musician Wynton Marsalis says that
his father was very gentle, that he loved his students
and they loved him, that he was happy for people who did
great things, though the best lesson he passed on to
young Wynton and subsequently to us is that you can be patient
with people and arrive at your feelings for them without
coming to any judgment, even if that means having
no feelings whatsoever: “Man, don’t feel like you got to
make yourself feel any way at all,” said the elder Marsalis,
because it’s okay to accept life just as it is. Have you ever
gone out to dinner and encountered a wine so special
that you buy a case of it and then find out that no bottle
you drink from that case is as appealing as that first one,
so you wind up not only regretting buying the case
but also spoiling some of the wonderful memories
of your night at the restaurant? Experts say that,
while we might remember the wine as extraordinary,
we may not realize that part of our enjoyment of it
flowed from the flickering candles, the beautiful music,
the yummy food, and the charming company. At home,
the same wine is just the wine, without the halo effect,
and it isn’t the same experience. It’s almost never possible
to revisit special experiences: the place where you spent
your honeymoon, for example, probably won’t make
a good family vacation spot, because two weeks of yelling
at the kids and trying to sneak in a few hours of sleep
every night will taint, if not erase, your earlier experience.
Next time, just enjoy the wine, commit the whole evening
to memory, don’t try to relive it, and look forward to what
comes next, especially if what comes next involves
your baby doll. Lucky you! See? Who’s the big shot now.
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Shit People Say to Me in the Park
A guy and a girl are walking toward me,
and the girl has a dog on a leash,
and the dog is looking very hard at another dog being led
by a man who is behind me
and whose own dog, in fact, is looking very hard
at the first dog,
and the guy is smiling and making eye contact,
and I know he’s going to say something to me,
and I’m pretty sure
it’s going to be something along the lines
of “Dogs sure like to look at other dogs,”
but instead he says, “A body in motion stays in motion, sir”
with which pronouncement I can scarcely take issue,
seeing as how Sir Isaac Newton
said as much in 1687
and no one since has disagreed, so I say,
“Indeed, it does, sir, indeed, it does,”
though I go on to add,
“Dogs sure like to look at other dogs”
since, having seen how his dog
looked at the dog of the man behind me,
I had that truism in mind already,
to which the guy says,
“And that’s true as well,”
and in this way do my new friend and I
conclude an exchange that has been brief
and just peculiar enough
to be mildly interesting
yet, on the whole, exceedingly pleasant,
though sometimes I wish
the people
I meet in the park
would just, shall we say,
make utterances that are a little more startling from time to time,
as they would
if they said things along the lines of
“Marriage is like a cage:
one sees the birds outside desperate to get in
and those inside desperate to get out,”
as Montaigne observed,
or “Marry, and you will regret it;
do not marry, and you will also regret it,”
to quote Kierkegaard,
not that everyone I meet in the park
has to comment
on the institution of marriage.
On the other hand,
much if not most of the shit people say to me in the park
is goofy enough
to make me think of all the goofy things
people have said to me elsewhere,
like the time my dad
was reading an essay in The New Yorker
and asked me
what S & M meant,
and when I was too embarrassed to answer, he said,
“I think it means sadism and masochism,
but if that’s the case,
why don’t they just say so?”
People in the park
aren’t always grammatical.
The other day
a guy said he’d just moved here
from Seattle and was wondering
if he’d done the right thing
but then realized
that “God don’t make mistakes,” as he put it.
Nobody uses language right
these days anyway.
Even my overeducated colleagues say,
“I’m just going to lay down for a minute”
and “between you and I,”
and our local churches
really need to master the so-called
“vocative O,”
because when you say “O God”
on your marquee,
you sound like an Old Testament prophet,
whereas when you say
“oh, God,” you sound like a mom
who’s had a bad night’s sleep
and whose toddler
just tipped over the dog’s water dish for the third time.
Actually, nothing makes sense in the park:
today a 400-pound man
who looked as though he’d had
a basket of kittens
for breakfast
rode through on his Harley
with his sound system blasting out Whitney Houston’s
“I Will Always Love You,”
surely one of the syrupiest love songs of our time.
Nothing makes sense in California, either.
In California, everybody’s young,
even the old.
Everybody’s slender, even the pudgy.
As to the homely,
they’re not beautiful,
but they’re no worse than plain.
Don’t you think more people
should take writing classes?
I do.
Most of the students
who apply to my workshop are female,
and when I said to one
that I’d let her in
if she promised to write
“like a woman on fire,”
she wrote back to say she’d write
“like a witch
at the stake.”
She got in, you betcha!
I make those kids
write six-word novels:
chickens hear
human flesh is tasty,
Zeus is sick of false religions,
Hitler deposed by son who’s worse,
demons possess faster
than exorcists exorcise,
his novel explained everything except itself.
They can do that or just hang around the park.
Here’s some other shit I’ve heard people say there:
He couldn’t make a snake out of Play-Doh,
couldn’t keep a job in a pie factory,
has more friends
than a postman
with a bagful of welfare checks.
He’s about half a bubble off plumb.
Arguing with him
was like trying to cram a wet noodle up a bobcat’s nose.
If you want to be struck by lightning,
you better stand under a tree.
If you got a dog that’ll hunt,
you don’t leave it tied to a drove-down rod in the yard.
He took off like a water bug.
She’s prettier than string music.
He’d slap you down quicker than nothin’.
They had them a whole stack of kids.
Money makes the mare trot.
When Daddy lit into me,
his voice sounded
like he was dragging it down
the side of a cabbage grater.
He played that piano like it stole something.
That old boy drank so much
that when he tried to dance,
he looked like a monkey fucking a football.
Point is, when you say something,
be colorful, for crisssake,
whether you’re in the park or not.
Be precise as well.
If somebody’s bugging you, you can say, “He’s a jerk!”
or “He’s an asshole!”
and nobody’ll know what you mean.
Or you can just say, “Yeah, he’s mean to the secretaries.”
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Smithereen
It’s “a tiny fragment or splinter,” though a smithereen
is also “a native of Smithers, British Columbia,”
and Smithereens plural is a rock band from Carteret,
New Jersey that was founded in 1980 and continues
to perform today—nice work, fellows! We poets are
all for artistic longevity since we want it for ourselves.
Baby, I’ve never been to Smithers, but I’d love to take you there.
Smithers is growing, attracting young families and retirees
who are drawn not only to economic opportunities, but also
to the abundant amenities of the Bulkley Valley, including
quality medical facilities, great schools, world-class outdoor
recreation opportunities, and a vibrant arts and culture scene.
Synonyms for “smithereen” include “morsel,” “mincemeat,”
“splinter,” “speck,” “slice,” “chunk,” and “atom.”
Isn’t everything made of atoms? That’s what they taught me
at Southdowns Elementary, though the idea goes back
at least to Lucretius who wrote that “primordial germs”
or mites are everywhere, leaping, meeting, clashing
and never resting, since “space has no bound nor measure,
and extends / Unmetered forth in all directions round.”
See? That’s exactly how big my love for you is! That’s what
I’ve been saying all along or was about to say,
that smithereens are not only everywhere but also very
powerful, at least in the aggregate, for a particle visible
to the naked eye will move when it is impacted by
many tiny invisible masses, i.e., atoms, a phenomenon
called Brownian motion after Scottish botanist Robert
Brown, though Lucretius was the first to describe it.
See? Smithereens are what I turn into when you kiss me.
That’s because I love you to pieces.
I love you the way peanut butter loves the roof of my mouth
just before I answer the phone.
I love you the way the cabinet door loves the back of my head
when I open it and bend down to get something
and forget that I left the door open and stand up again.
I love you the way the copy machine loves paper jams.
I love you the way a little church with a collapsing ceiling
and cracked walls loves polyphonic singing.
I love you the way I love any one of the the Three Stooges for saying,
“Poifect!” or any two or all three of them, for that matter.
I love you the way the neighbor’s milk boils over when she’s in
the other room, rubbing the belly of her “good boy.”
I love you the way a hippie’s sleeping bag loves the sidewalk
when he camps out overnight so he can get tickets
for next week’s groovy concert.
I love you the way a hot dog loves mustard but hates ketchup.
I love you the way I love Mel Brooks for saying if you don’t laugh
when you hear the word “Buick,” then you don’t know
what’s funny.
I love you the way the translator I was talking to last week
said she loved translating Simone de Beauvoir
but not Julia Kristeva.
I love you the way I love Pindar for saying, “Become what you are,
having learned what that is,” but I love you especially
for saying,“Wear out the stones of your own street,”
which is same thing.
When someone says, “I love you with every atom of my being,”
aren’t they saying, “I love you to smithereens”? Lucretius would
say so. I will love you long after the Smithereens have stopped
playing, which I hope is at a point far in the future, though
I don’t hope that as much as the musicians themselves do.
I will love you years after the town of Smithers has been
incorporated by a nearby town such as Witset, Kitwanga,
Kitimat, Topley, or Prince Rupert.
“The best way to know God is to love many things,”
says Van Gogh. Yeah, but you’re everything.
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David Kirby teaches at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is also the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He is currently on the editorial board of Alice James Books.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 