This is part an essay I wrote for The Tampa Review titled, “Poems and the Psyche: The Threat of Making Art, One Writer’s Journey.”   You can see the full series here.

Little wonder we poets have our own writing defenses— ways of subverting or otherwise muting the voice. The most obvious of course is the block. The voice refusing to speak. The soul refusing to speak. Blocks, like psychological defenses, offer places where the soul can heal or hide as it needs to, as all souls must. (Yet not all blocks stem from perceived danger, some stem from the soul’s involvement in other fields. Others may indicate that the soul has nothing to say; having emptied itself out, it needs time to collect its thoughts before refocusing.) Next is the poet’s careful selection of what may be said—what topics may be taken on in the poem and what can be said about them. Because so much of who we are is emotion, and so many feelings tend not to be trusted—we are tempted to avoid them and make art that is clever, artful, even painterly perhaps, but not honest. The paradox then is that we write because we have something to say, but our fear of exposure is so great that it stops us from writing. One solution is to disguise the truth as fantasy; less successful is writing lifeless things. The result may satisfy the poet’s internal censors, but because the poet takes no risks, the reader is not moved. The poem that results is less than the language and overwhelmed by technique. When the soul is missing from the poem, the voice is missing and when voice is missing, I believe we have no poem, just a clever collection of words.

Each of us has our own idiosyncratic ways of subverting voice which closely resemble the defenses we use in our everyday emotional lives. For the most part, these defenses are unconscious. They have been so incorporated into our personality that they function on their own, and only a very careful study of our own psyche brings them into focus. Examples are avoidance, denial and repression all of which involve ‘forgetting’ and dismissal of certain feelings and experiences; they simply do not exist. Intellectualization involves the use of reason to explain away emotions. Compartmentalization is the tendency to view parts of the psyche as isolated and without influence or interaction. Hysteria involves elaborate exploration of every nuance of a feeling or experience and the tendency to give all equal weight so that the distinction between what is important and what is not is lost.

In my own case, my defense pattern is a combination of intellectualization and hysteria. My impulse is to overwrite or to write around a topic rather than hitting it head on. Though I concluded that I was/am inarticulate, I believe this ‘muddy’ writing is less a problem with language and more likely related to not knowing myself what I really mean. I need not to know. When I catch myself saying or thinking something ‘bad’ or questionable, my immediate self-protective response is to glaze over or get lost in lesser details thus extinguishing the original thought. The voice gets bogged down with vague approximations of the truth.

To complicate things, and now I am speaking of all of us, it’s the unspoken, the part that has been so inhibited, that has in its imprisonment, greatest energy. Silenced for so long, it has much to say. It is this drive toward speech that necessitates, even demands the poem and informs the voice. In fact, it is the voice.

This war between silence and speech will be waged to a greater or lesser extent in all of our poems. In my own case, saying more than the subject requires or using too much detail can make it difficult for the reader to locate the focus of the poem. Sometimes I think of it as the voice screaming. Finally let out, it rushes to say everything for fear of the next silence. The challenge for me then is to aspire towards that fine line where I let the voice pour out but not so much as to drown itself and the reader. On the other hand, since I often err on the side of saying more, in my impulse to be more acceptable—which for me means spare and stark as opposed to conversational– to correct for that seeming messiness, I often carve the life out of the voice.  I make my wished-for small stark poems, and, in so doing, ‘create’ flat dead poems.  The finest small poems are meant to enliven a particular detail, but mine amount to short-circuiting a process. The truth is that my natural voice, in keeping with my personality, is vociferous, and my aesthetic project is to follow the emotional and psychological patterns of experience and that involves many steps and a lot of detail. Since my goal is charting process, much as I long for it, summary is not enough.

My eventual solution to the battle between saying too much and saying too little goes back to my uncensored writing. I explore every tributary or image that comes to me, and then I leave the poem alone. I have no idea where that fine line is… what’s too little or too much until I let the emotion cool off and I come back to the poem and reenter it. At that point, with the advantage of distance, the more essential elements of the poem will usually call out to me.

Pursuing this discussion still further, it follows that if voice is the soul’s utterances, then literature resides in that place where language and form are in harmony with the voice. The voice chooses the language and the form. It knows what it has to say and how it wants to say it. So language and line, form and syntax all serve to advance the soul’s message. Because some voices are loud, celebrant, some histrionic, others pensive, reserved, each need different venues—paragraphs, lines, language, tone. Lines will loosen, tighten, language will become more muscular, more relaxed depending on the emotion expressed. Typically, the quieter, more reserved the voice, the tighter the language, the shorter the line. The more expansive, bountiful, angry… the more the line will have to stretch out and oftentimes the language will have to loosen to accommodate the feeling—huge as it is. So too with the choice of form—poetry or prose—narrative or lyric, formal or free verse. The art we strive for is a seamless one—where the frame or craft serves and enhances the art without drawing attention to itself as artifact. So too with prose. Just as the soul, the face and the finger-print are each unique so too is our way of relating a story and unfolding a character or series of characters.