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.

As critical as voice is to our poems, few talk about it—what it is, how we ‘find’ it, what interferes with or enhances it–this elusive thing we can’t make art without.

It is my contention that voice is the soul of the artist speaking. Initially unconscious and as unique as the internal private terrain of each person, voice is an amalgam of all the verbal and preverbal experience—conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational –of the writer. In a sense, a door opens inside the writer revealing that place where the soul lives. That door opens and the soul slips out. Voice is the soul of all art.

(When I speak of voice, though, I am not suggesting that it is singular—that each of us has but one voice that chants for or from all parts of the soul; rather I’m referring to the whole orchestra of voices—generations of voices we’ve known, listened to, assimilated and or rejected).

But much of what the soul has to say is strange and forbidden, therefore threatening. What we fear most is censure. Our impulse is to hide –to protect ourselves in the poem in much the same way we do in our everyday lives.  But to the extent that we are successful in sabotaging the voice, we’ve sacrificed the poem or story. Problems of voice erupt when this need to conceal is greater than the need to speak.

Essentially, the freeing of voice is synonymous with the freeing of the person. For the poet to speak, she must have available to her all the rooms in which she lives. She must have access– not necessarily understanding. In fact, given the intricacies of the psyche, understanding will always be tentative and incomplete. But poems are about discovery. The greater the discovery, the stronger the poem. But the challenge to this discovery is, as discussed earlier, is the terror of what will be revealed Though not all writers come from the same restrictive terrain that I do, we all walk around with censors inside that dictate what is acceptable and what is not. Each time we write a poem, we risk discovering something bizarre and/or distasteful about ourselves, and the reality of that constitutes a significant threat. (That being said, the threat of the poem is far greater than the threat of personal discovery. In our own lives, we apprehend ourselves all the time and to the extent that we are psychologically aware of the workings of our unconscious, we decode its messages. All of this happens privately and for the most part remains so. Not so in a poem. Each time we write, we risk making public some strangeness that in our everyday lives we strive to deny even from ourselves. The challenge of the poem then may well be greater than that of even therapy. Or confession.  In these, we reveal to ourselves and one other what we do not want to know; in the poem, we open it up to the world.)