Voice that!

poetry workshop

from Charles Bernstein's "Stray Straws and Straw Men":

"The sanctification of the natural comes up in terms of 'voice' & has been extended by various excursions into the oral. On the one hand, there is the assumption that poetry matures in the location of 'one's own voice' which as often as not is no more than a consistency of style & presentation. 'The voice of the poem' is an easy way of contextualizing poetry so that it can be more readily understood (indiscriminately plugged into) as listening to someone talk in their distinctive manner . . .

"What I want to call attention to is that there is no natural writing style; that the preference for its supposed manifestations is simply a preference for a particular look to poetry & often a particular vocabulary (usually perceived as personal themes) . . . "

Something to think about, anyway.

Susan