from the heart

freeing the writer’s voice

“I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.”

—Marge Piercy, “To be of use” (1982)

“(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?”

—Charles Olson, “Projective Verse” (1950)

The “writer’s voice” is imagined to be a thing that exists. So we’ll start there.

The writer’s voice is imagined to be a thing that exists, and a project comes up around this supposition that the writer’s voice be tracked down. To “find your voice,” which is the assumed goal, you must conceive of the voice as a noun. The writer’s voice is not only lying there or hidden somehow, but, when uncovered, is then to be mined productively.

Nevermind the process we are somehow meant to engage in to find this elusive “true” voice—something akin to psychoanalysis, which posits there is a truth deep down we must labor to uncover—face up to! A truth, a rightness, that will explain it all and be it all.

“How should I put this?” The thought that has blocked me from sharing this for months. I didn’t think I’d have the time to say everything I have to say about this concept, this new metaphor, and what it might mean—and how to translate it, to break it up, to contain it?

So instead of worrying “How should I put this?” all I’m doing in this post is putting it down. I can’t keep thinking about everything I need to write about this and just start from scratch and remove every possible block from my path to getting to you. The rest of my work is about creating structure and containment and can’t also be about that here. So I type—I am typing SO hard—where I normally hover over keys and wonder and talk. I am TYPING TO YOU about an important topic! T-T-Ti-Ti-T! The writer’s voice is not a noun. It is your perspective, experience, and values, your style and what you appreciate, it’s your priorities, your sense of humor and your mood, it’s what you notice, the impact you want to have and it’s what you carry.

Are you seeing it?

These things all change.

One thing doesn’t change: and this isn’t at all about “spirituality” or even metaphysics, but just lived experience and close listening: your heart. Whatever that makes you think of, whatever the heart means to you, I believe that’s where you’re really “coming from,” as a writer and “as a human.” The heart is like the pocket inside a magician’s coat. You can’t peek in there. It’s a star in that way. The voice comes through endlessly in ribbons. Just open the pocket and tug.

If it’s anything else, let it be a path, which is a ribbon too. Let it be a river.

What do you see?

Writers want to “channel” all the time, to “channel” the voice—a word that makes me think of how we dam the rivers to flow in “the right direction.” A channel could be making the river a regulated “use”—tying the ribbon around the neck of a stockbroker. You don’t own this. In fact, you can’t ever get really very close to it. If you find it, you can pick it up and handle it—it’s yours, get real close, bother its whiskers with your perfume, rub off the powder from its wings, protect it with your obsessive love and awful fear. If you free it, you may watch it grace through your life while you throw sticks from its path, and feeling it—your fingers outstretched to waving tips of translucent fur—while not grasping at it to stay. You may follow.

The most important shift from “finding your voice” to freeing it, is that FINDING makes of your voice a RESOURCE. A resource is something to be used—tap that!—and, in the end, used up. You may find, when you’ve “found” what appears to be “your” voice (or truth, or one true self), that you quickly come to rely on this resource as the truth or as “right.” This resource, fixed and for you, to be guarded, even from yourself, becomes a trap, a hole in the ground higher than your arms can reach to wave from. To prove that the voice you found was you all along, and not just another hole in the ground, your work becomes the work of replication, not creation. You can “live out” your findings, “play out” your resource, digging in, not building out. Freeing the voice gives you the opportunity to realize the voice through the life you actually live.

The difference between the voice as a noun and the voice as the path is only one of these can be lost or depleted when it is given away (and so, again, it is so often NOT given, not given but kept locked up sometimes EVEN from the writer herself!), while the other is always drawing FROM and FOR—from someone, for someone, as water is drawn through a well (imagine if we did think of resources suchly), as two synapses touching through electric time. And it is the way of moving stories THROUGH and TO—through someone to someone. Freeing the voice moves us toward—rather than separating us with our precious thing we worked so hard to “find” (and therefore can not be wrong about, ie ever change anything about, because then we’d have to have been wrong, found the wrong thing, must live up to, messed it up somehow! Instead of letting the voice continue to run through, changing all the time with time, as, even, a beloved character playing the role of time). If the voice is not a noun and a resource but a becoming and a path then our work isn’t to dream to “channel” but to work to free this voice in order that it will become, to unblock this path which is there.

Now you’ve heard it: stop “finding the voice,” and work instead to free it.

These are the blocks, bad oil, blood in the tracks:

The stories that limit your sense of what is possible and who you are—

• what is useful or productive

• what will be seen as skillful or important

• what’s a “good use of time”

• what “creativity is for” / what “I am meant for” / my “one true self”

• being right / being good / being justifiable or believable as human

• ad valorum

The other voices writing all your rules—

• writers you (or someone ELSE!) say are great, so much greater than you

  • (ideas about genius)

• the teachers who said you had so much potential

• the teachers who said you were shit or else “built for something else”

• the abuser, the exciting friend, the parent, the Man, the boss

• ab extra

So many inherited ideas about writing—

• what writing “is” / what good writing looks like

• what being a writer looks like / needs / is habituated as

• being simple, being ornate, being concise, being narrative, writing for everyone, being impressive—how are we to follow all these rules??

• the idea of influencing others and the idea of “expertise”

• writing as obfuscation, or writing as proof, writing to get approval to leave jail

• ab absurdo

Systemic / algorithmic bullshit—

• seeking validation when what you really deserve is acknowledgement

How do we do this? Well I’ve been writing about it here! Deconstruct the ideas that are speaking through you—who said this, when did I learn this, what influenced it, when was it reenforced, what rules does it have for my behavior and what I’m allowed to think and even feel? And do I agree? Knowing all this, do I agree with these rules? Question assumptions—which are learned!—and always doubt cliches. Freeing your voice is a continual questioning of assumptions and deconstructing ideas that are speaking through you but which are not you, breaking down the barriers that are blocking your voice. To quote a podcast my friends are sick of me recommending, “Because they don’t know who they are, they repeat the mantras of authority.” Freeing the voice liberates others. So look at your mantras in your ideas, rules, and cliches—what am I repeating that I do not condone or cannot fully stand behind? Where is there the gap?

Freeing the voice doesn’t mean that the first thing that comes out is your real truth. Editing—deconstructing, revising, changing or realizing what you think, refining a point of view, focusing on how something will be understood and what you actually believe and really want to say and to whom—that is the liberating work we’re talking about. To remove what is blocking THOSE things from moving through your heart toward someone else. From moving through your real heart to the you you’re sure is bodiless, moving through like a needle now to stitch you closer together with yourself. You may find that the stitching mends something. You may find that the first thing becomes closer to the last thing, or not and never, or sometimes but not most times—it’s ok and no matter, it’s the gap where we are creative and the gap is always there one way or another. Being creative means you can see the gap. Creativity means you contribute something to closing it—between real and imagined, self and other, (Keats as a swan on a lake between the shore-bound figures of himself and his image!), thought and voice, as-are and as-could-be, between one thing and some other thing few others or no one else could describe a relationship between, but still opens something up for someone else—that which resonates across the water, using the water to move.

Your voice is freed ab intra, from within, from the heart. And for always—for others, which includes the yous you’ve been and are. From, for, through, to. Nothing to be found that is already there—only meaning and meaningfulness to be created and related. No self to be most true or without-others. No self more important than any others—no spiritual sense of transcendence through creativity, no spirituality a dog can’t have—but what moves us, laterally, closer to each other, we write as we read which is to transport. Stop seeing the self, finally voiced, as a core to be mined, or a thing that transcends. But the heart of yours that beats to live, that shares that nature with every other human being and is aligned with creatures, yet is unique in you also. Olson’s breath. A kite. A field. A string. This life.

Next up:

1. Drafting our Identities — how freeing the voice as a revisionary principle can help us relate to the self as becoming.

2. Writing as Relating — how freeing the voice (from / for / through / to) allows us to have a healthy relationship with the reader throughout our process

3. Announcement about this newsletter!

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