The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice

by Tony Hoagland

An award-winning poet, teacher, and “champion of poetry” (Neil Genzlinger, New York Times ) demystifies the elusive element of voice. In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. In short, essayistic chapters and an appendix of thirty stimulating exercises, The Art of Voice explores the myriad ways to create a distinctive poetic voice, including vernacular, authoritative statement, speech register, tone-shifting, and using secondary voices. “Rich with lively examples” ( New York Times Book Review ), The Art of Voice provides a compelling introduction to contemporary poetry and an invaluable guide for any practicing writer.

Genres: Poetry, Writing, Nonfiction, Crafts, Essays, Literary Criticism

176 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2019

About the author

Tony Hoagland was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He earned a BA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of Arizona.

Hoagland was the author of the poetry collections Sweet Ruin (1992), which was chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and won the Zacharis Award from Emerson College; Donkey Gospel (1998), winner of the James Laughlin Award; What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Rain (2005); Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010); Application for Release from the Dream (2015); Recent Changes in the Vernacular (2017); and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018).

He has also published two collections of essays about poetry: Real Sofistakashun (2006) and Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays (2014). Hoagland’s poetry is known for its acerbic, witty take on contemporary life and “straight talk,” in the words of New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner: “At his frequent best … Hoagland is demonically in touch with the American demotic.”

Hoagland’s many honors and awards included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He received the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. Hoagland taught at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. He died in October 2018..

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if this book is short (168 pp.) by intent or by dint of its author's death while in progress. In any event, the poet Kay Cosgrove worked with Hoagland and, no doubt, after his death, to see the essays to fruition.

What's encouraging about the book is the way it frees shackles from many writers --- specifically poets practicing under the dictum that all poetry must be "cut to the bone" to be successful.

Turns out, Hoagland proves, not so much. Good voice poems succeed in the same way good cuts of meat do. They leave a little fat for the flavor.

My full review of the book can be found here. If you want more quotes still from the book, the two posts before the linked review will provide them.

As for four stars vs. five: a simple matter of greed. Hoagland generously offers example poems to support his arguments. I just was frustrated with the number of poems that were excerpted instead of provided in their complete form.

Forget Ishmael. Call me Greedy.

[Leanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was so interesting to read a book about the poetic voice. This is something I confess I have never once even considered. Recently, I watched a masterclass online given by Billy Collins on the craft of poetry, and I just loved it. I feel learning something about the art can help so much as a reader and lover of poetry.

I have to say, I am not a huge fan of this style of American poetry, including Hoagland. That is not to say he is not a genius, but it is just something that leaves me cold. And I realized reading his wonderful book that in part it is for two reasons. One of he is very big on showing the movement of the mind. I probably prefer work that is calmer and shows a moment, in the way you see in Japanese poetry, for example. I have always disliked personal things. And am not happy being in someone's mind. I definitely prefer frozen moments of the world "out there" and not too much information inside someone else's head. But I loved reading this part about "movements of the mind" and multiple voices of the same mind. His poetry is expert at that.

Second, he discusses very effectively how register works in poetry. I realized that I fundamentally dislike the middle and lower registers in poetry. Hey, to each his own, right? Also, one of my pet peeves is the follow list of colloquial additives (I really hate to get texts with these and I now see poets in America are being encourages to embrace them to attain intimacy). A possible exception was Pessoa's "Listen Daidy."

"Take it from me," "believe me," "the thing is" (HATE), "here’s the thing" (double hate), "if you say so" (passive aggressive), "I’m the kind of person who" (I don't care)... Marie Howe are Billy Collins make much use of these and work in a middle register that I found dull. (Even though I will never forget some of his images, like the lanyard and his father's hat).

I was thinking of checking out a poet he recommended Meredith Cole. Her work inspired by Japan sounded really interested and loved her poem Relationships, that he included in book. I loved this book--even if I don't prefer his style of poetry and bet he was a great teacher.

[Andrew H · Rating 3 out of 5]

'At the risk of sounding naively patriotic, such aliveness of voice seems like a great strength of American poetry in the last hundred years."

That is undoubtedly true, in which case it is rather odd that what Hoagland calls an "improvised anthology" is based mainly on recent poetry. The selected examples, for me, don't represent the "aliveness" that The Art of the Voice trumpets.

There are some astute observations, but the writing reminded me (regrettably) of university lectures -
the type where a worthy discourses on a poem and dresses it up in rhetoric: what one really hears in the voice of the lecturer. Too often the writing felt like a mummified chrysalis from which a butterfly did not emerge:

"The specific lexicon of such speech additives and asides may change from decade to decade or according to region, class, and generation, but our daily speech is crowded with them, and they are an important element in creating the atmosphere of much contemporary poetry."

There is rather a lot of this wordiness in The Art of the Voice and that fact is something of a problem. On one hand, the book asserts that the voice is about "intimacy"; on the other hand, it is written in such a waffly style that intimacy is the last thing that occurs between author and reader.

I can see this book appearing on MFA reading lists and appealing to other creative writing programmes; and it will appeal to practising poets who lean towards Hoagland's favoured type of prosaic, semi-confessional-social stuff. Unfortunately, it fell on deaf ears as far as I was concerned.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tony Hoagland is both a great writer AND teacher of poetry. The two don’t always come together.

I’ve read all of Hoagland’s verse as well as his books on craft. This particular book, about voice, is as good as any of his others, though it’s subject is a bit trickier to define let alone teach people how to enhance or clarify.

But Hoagland does it. As usual. The biggest problem, for me, is remembering all these things I’m learning when I’m in the unconscious first drafts and the granularity of rewrites. But perhaps, as Hoagland suggests, the exercises herein (they are GREAT) will produce skills and “moves” that become muscle memory.

Hoagland is a treasure.

[kale hensley · Rating 2 out of 5]

A better guide on voice would be Mary Karr’s the Art of Memoir. Something about the way male poets write guide books makes me want to eat glass.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent craft book, among the best I've read. Clear examples of different aspects of voice in poetry, and an acknowledgement that voice, like the self, is rarely a unitary thing. I plan to work through the exercises at the back of the book more slowly. Highest of recommendations if you're looking for some unpretentious practical advice on writing or even reading poetry.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minsoo, did you choose this one, or did I? I can't remember because we were grabbing books right when I remembered that I forgot where my kids were. Either way, one of us benefited from some situational grace or intuitive genius in checking this one out.

Concise commentary, source poems mostly by poets I had never heard of, highly readable and instructive without being overtly instructional. My God, language is such a miracle. Exercises at the end of the book all worth trying.

[Bo · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 plus. An indispensable guide for poets wanting to hone their craft with an emphasis on voice. I highly recommend doing the exercises at each chapter's end -- practice reinforces the written instruction with surprisingly grand results.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great for poets and writers of prose who need help "finding" their voice.

[Francescajemm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accessible, practical, and insightful. What more could you want from a guidebook to writing stronger poetry? I’m also a big fan of most of the poets whose work he analyzes. Bonus points for plenty of prompts and exercises at the end of the book!

[Anna]

I enjoyed much of the book and thought it was very helpful in beginning a discussion about poetic voice. From what I got in school, voice is often taught as the 'attitude' of the speaker. This goes far beyond that and the broader discussion is much appreciated. The chapters are pleasantly short and usually sufficient at getting their point across. A few of the last chapters felt a bit rushed or simply unsatisfying - maybe would have benefited from more time with the subject (authority chapter especially) or more varied examples/explanations. That being said, I am motivated to check out some of the exercises and consider this a worthwhile read.

P.S. also appreciate the emphasis on learning, and that the use of poetic voice CAN be learned

[Caroline Bock · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for any writer and any lifelong student of writing of which I include myself. Excellent craft essays on voice -- for poetry -- and for fiction writers, and even more: inspiring prompts. this is a lasting tribute to a great American poet, Tony Hoagland, who passed away in 2019.

--Caroline

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very clearly written. Often sends one off to pursue his example poets. It would be good to have the book at hand for when one needs to be pushed by the exercises.

[Michael Garrigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great study of the poetic voice. Clear and direct with its instruction and encouragement.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book of its kind I’ve read.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will miss this forceful, intelligent voice. A confident and deft swan song from a master of craft.

[Sinbad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tony Hoagland offers in his book "the art of voice" a selection of tools for authors to compose poetry. Throughout the chapters of the book, the reader will discover poetry written by contemporary poets together with Hoagland's analysis and decortication of the poems to make apparent their inner structure and outer forms.

In the following paragraphs, I quote some excerpts that have created an impression in me, because of their clarity and the objectivity of the truth that they convey:

"The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person"
(p. 103, from Czselaw Milosz' poem 'Ars Poetica?'.

"Contradiction [...] is the nature of the world and of human nature as well. It says different things simultaneously and speaks in multiple registers. [...] California, you read, has legalized marijuana, but you have just learned that your partner is having an affair. [...] It's easy enough to ironize such postmodern moments, but we stand in the crosswinds of them every day, and they sometimes threaten to pull us apart. What can a poem do?

Well, a skilled poetic voice can personalize and frame moments in such a way as to grant them human meaning. A good poem can shape experience into a kind of tango that makes facts dance and shape-shift until we find we must reconsider once again; we must concede one more time that we are vulnerable to wonder, grief, outrage, and reflection. 'Be afraid', said the French poet Apollinaire: 'Be afraid of the day you can look on a locomotive without a sense of wonder!' " (p. 101-102)

"The role of voice in poetry is to deliver the paradoxical facts of life with warmth and élan, humor, intelligence, and wildness. Such art requires a particular spirit and particular set of skills that the preceding discussions and examples try to exemplify. In the end, perhaps, each good poem is a kind of miracle birth, possessing a different ingenuity and metabolism. But poetry is a craft as well as an art, and the insights and techniques of craft, like carpentry, can be taught, learned, practiced, and relished." (p. 114)

"A decade or so ago the writer David Shields published a book about writing called Reality Hunger, whose title suggests the deep craving in the postmodern soul for something more tangible than electronic information. We have a great desire to be brought once again into contact with the physical, sensuous, objective world. When the material imagination is at work, a good poem can deliver an encounter with moments physically vivid enough to answer that craving.

The stuff of our daily lives and hte meaning-freighted relationship between things themselves - this scuffed shoe and that umbrella, the abandoned house on Hickory Lane where the crazy man sleeps on cold nights - create an atmosphere that shapes the audience's reception of the poem. All of it mixes into a kind of habitat that consciousness requires in order to expand and concentrate. AS much as any novelist, the poet, with her voice, has to build such a habitat." (p. 36-37)

"The truth, a writer's voice is made form other writers' voices. Pieced together, picked and chosen, stumbled into, uninformed: influence seems like an involuntary series of contagions that eventually turns into a sort of vessel, or transportation system.

As we acquire a sense of taste, and perhaps a sense of vocation, our reading becomes more directed and targeted, but we are bent and shaped and destined to be changed by the genius of others. Compare it to the theory behind cannibalism, if you like. One eats the heart of the admired one and becomes them." (p. 52)

Finally, pages 115-160 provide a set of exercises to practice writing, based on the poems explained in the book. This part is still pending in my own research and therefore I send out the seed of a dream to come back to the book and practice in the light of these exercises.

Thanks Tony and Cay Cosgrove for sharing your wisdom with me.

[Stephen Kowalkowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tony Hoagland is a poet writing for poets, but I’d recommend these essays to any artist working with language, especially someone wanting to improve their diction.

Hoagland shows how a poet can create “an atmosphere of connectedness” by using “interruptives, asides, idioms, rhetorical questions, declaratives…to cushion and modulate the so-called ‘contents’ of our communications” (20). Hoagland stresses the importance of nouns, claiming that every good poet is a good “namer” (32); nouns connect us to the physical world, the world of objects. This connection is particularly important in our modern era of desk-bound work and screen-oriented leisure.

Hoagland teaches how to subtly inject a sense of community through the use of vernacular: “Nationalities, professions, different cluster-communities of social class and ethnicity—we all have our self-identifying vocabularies. Whether you are a steelworker or a stockbroker, you probably possess a vocabulary that gives you pleasure to use with another of your tribe. We use our vernaculars in the way that animals deploy various smells and glands: to tell others who we are and who we are with. Or, conversely, maybe we use it the way chameleons use color: to blend in” (42). I think this lesson could just as easily be applied to fiction writing.

When writing a craft book about voice, an author must inevitable address the question of how a young writer is to find their voice. Hoagland answers, “The truth is, a writer’s voice is made from other writers’ voices” (52). Read everything, and by filtering that material through your unique consciousness, a unique voice will emerge. And definitely don’t be afraid of reading, as if it might corrupt you. “The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn’t school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty. Such aesthetic cloistering is like protecting your virginity in the belief that it will make you better at sex” (53). Well put, Tony.

There’s a good chapter on the different registers: high, medium, and low. Most people who’ve only briefly come in contact with poetry are aware of the high register, that lofty and formal tone that either carries you to the heavens or puts you to sleep. Hoagland provides some really compelling examples of poets modulating between the various registers within the same poems as a means of carefully controlling the emotional effect.

One means of keeping the readers on their toes is to inject multiple voices into a poem by quoting somebody (the author calls this chapter Imported Voices: Bringing Other Speakers into the Poem). I’ve been reading a lot of David Kirby lately, and his whole style hinges on this technique, drawing in voices as diverse as Otis Redding and Montaigne. These voices need not exist as dialogue, though; they can be implied. Sometimes they even rattle around in the same head. Hoagland captures the beauty and horror of our fractured consciousness by quoting Czselaw Milosz’s poem “Ars Poetica?”(103): The purpose of poetry is to remind us/ how difficult it is to remain just one person.

In addition to the essays the book contains a section of exercises associated with each chapter. For the chapter called Voices Borrowed from the Environment, a friend of mine used a prompt to write a poem in the form of an airport announcement, which goes to show that being aware of all the technical choices available to you can spark a creative premise.

The art of writing is too difficult to pin down for any book of craft to offer some unique revelation. Best case scenario, reading these types of texts can make you more self-aware, more conscious of how to choose your words, structure your narratives, evoke an emotional response. These essays accomplish exactly that, and the exercises offer some interesting starting points to put these lessons into effect.

[Kyle C]

Voice is easily the dominant metaphor we use to talk about writing—English teachers strive to "cultivate their students' voices"; editors are always "searching for new voices"; and every writer has "their own unique voice". In these cases, voice is not the vocalization of sounds; it is the unique verbal signature of the writer, a crafted and individualized form of expression. But "voice" has not always been the way critics have talked about writing. Classical rhetoricians instead spoke about "style" or "color" or "persona" to describe the identifiable ways in which poets and orators varied their speech. Voice in some ways is a paradoxical anachronism—many poems and novels are no longer spoken aloud at all. The "voice" of contemporary literature is fundamentally a written one, not an oral one. We rarely hear the author's voice at all.

Tony Hoagland's short book gives an excellent dissection of what we mean by voice in a technical sense. It is a combination of many different types of verbal skills. First, the contemporary poet avoids stuffy pretentiousness; the poet's voice feels like a real individual person, not a grandiloquent speechifier. The poet has to "reveal the mind in motion", showing the ways in which we backtrack, change topics, lose our train of thought, or revise our perceptions. The poet creates a unique voice by showing the complexity of thought. While poems don't have to be confessional, poets should create a sense of confiding intimacy. Hoagland advises that students play around with conversational interjections and fillers ("here's the thing", "anyway", "well, you see"). Imagery is important but it has to be grounded in a unique sensibility of the world (I liked the poem by C.D. Wright "Everything good between men and women/ has been written in mud and butter/ and barbecue sauce"). The poet is an artist of the vernacular and acutely understands all linguistic registers—not just sublime purple prose but lowly genres such as recipes, corporate memos, and break-up cliches. Voice then is a mastery of tone, register, and style, and the poet does not adhere to one particular kind of verbal code; the poet is always blending different registers and styles. A poet will combine gnomic authority and outrageous vulgarity, shifting from a high register to a low one, incorporating different ways of seeing the world.

This is a useful book, short but with good selections of poems and exercises to practice different kinds of "vocal" exercises. It provides a repertoire of ways in which students can experiment with different voices.

[عدنان العبار · Rating 5 out of 5]

One is justified for reading this book if only to see the poems collected by Mr. Hoagland for analysis. He would be even more justified if he had read it for the analyses. Hoagland is a reader who is enviable for his ability to see much more than what appears on the page. (As Vonnegut puts it, he is able to see the action happening on the 5th dimension.)

This is a book about the spirit and the language a poem is written in: The register with which the poem is narrated; is it lofty as the Romantic poems were, or mundane, of this world, as much of contemporary poems are — and what does each register serve in the functionality of a poem? And how intimate, how close, does the poem want you to be to it? And so on.

I sincerely think that a poem who is not reading this monograph, or Mary Oliver’s A Poetic Handbook, is missing a lot — a lot of what is necessary for being a poem worth remembering.

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book introduces ways to discover voice for poetry, and periodically invites you to try a few exercises offered at the back of the book. I found this to be a nice balance of reading and then writing.

This stretching of normal practice and focus seems like a healthy and fun way to keep writing, learning and enjoying the content, rhythms, complexity and mannerisms of one’s own voice.

It is intended for poets of all ages to “encourage them to see poetic voice as a matter of artful exertion and craft, not accident or genius.”

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first part of the book, the different chapters about voice, pretty much from top to bottom. I didn't love the prompts in the back part of the book as much. I don't think they needed so many examples and could have instead used more direction. And maybe they were too specific at times. Some were better than others, and some I might actually use, but I wanted to like more of them. Anyway, I do recommend the book, just didn't love the prompts.

[Dan Slone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't written poetry for decades. I picked up this book to work on "voice" in my novels. I highly recommend it. It is a quick study in the use of voice and changed the way I read poetry. It gave me better insight into how to provide different voices to my characters. It even inspired me to think about writing poetry again. If you like exercises it has them and they look well thought out. I only did one, but I'm not much on this kind of homework.

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for new and experienced poets. I marked so many passages—many more than I anticipated doing—so I can easily return to the insights and valuable information.

Hoagland does not present essays on voice here—he has an array of contemporary poems that he examines for voice. There are also prompts and exercises and more poems after the essays.

I will be much more conscious of my speaker’s voice in my poems from now on.

I highly recommend!

[John Fredrickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though this book is short (only 114 pages of text that is expository, followed by additional pages of exercises for those who are interested), it is very interesting and cogent. I (quite often) have difficulty with much modern poetry, but the poems and poets that are included in this book are brilliant.

[Tandava Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good study of a particular aspect of poetry. Organizationally, it was a bit odd, with the exercises for each chapter put together all at the end of the book, even though they were really just extensions of their chapters, with discussions of more sample poems and everything. So you have to flip back and forth for the most coherent reading sequence.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book the further and further I read into it. A confession: I do not write poetry. I read books like these because I think they make me a better writer of prose, because they cause me to think, because they open my eyes. The last quarter of the book are exercises to work on - and they seem very helpful. I enjoyed the book a lot.

[Donald Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good stimulus....

Any book on the craft of poetry that makes you think or expand how you write is worth reading. This book does that. Like any "workbook", to get the maximum value is to do the exercises, even if some are trite.
Regardless of one's level at writing poetry this will, if nothing else, stimulate ideas.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been at the writing thing for 30 years or more.
I've written at least one poem a day for over 20.
I've published over 20 books of the stuff. And,

this book helped me... terribly...
changed me and the way I work, even.

I really should re-read it at least once a year.

[Jeremy Kester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and sweet, this was a great book on poetry and a poet's voice. It has some great exercises in the back that I will be taking advantage of to hone my craft. It is a great book for anyone who is interested in learning more on both writing or reading poetry.