Voice Lessons

Essay
by Dana Delibovi

An image recurs…

It comes when I work quietly at my desk. It arrives in the liminal time when I drift off to sleep, sometimes before a hypnic jerk rouses me again. In this image, I see the poet Charles Simic, still a teenager in Chicago, late at night in his room, sitting before a small desk with a single lamp. Simic writes with a pencil on a yellow pad. He teaches himself to be a poet, to express himself in that unmistakably Simic voice. He smiles contentedly. He loves what he’s doing; he senses on this very night what he will assert years later: “for all the lovers of poetry, there is only more, and never enough.”

Maybe I keep dredging up this image because I want to love to write, but I never have. I conjure Simic, a poet I admire, looking for his voice as a young poet and feeling happy with that process. Teenage Simic’s contentment is not the joy sparked by things external to the process, like the publication of a poem. It is not the feeling that comes from public success as a writer. It’s pleasure in the act of writing itself.

I’ve reflected a lot on the image. Through it, I’ve come to think that contentment in writing poetry arises from the search for one’s own poetic voice. I haven’t enjoyed the act of writing poetry because I never seek my own voice. I try instead to be some older, smarter girl with a better upbringing, like Jane Hirshfield or Louise Glück. I can’t find my voice, because I’m looking for someone else’s. So when I write, I’m alienated from myself, and it hurts .

∞

I grew up a working-class Italian kid in a very wealthy town in Connecticut. Nowadays, the town has no residents but the richest rich—“like Rodeo Drive,” said my Aunt Angelica on a visit from Florida. But in my tender years, the ‘60s and ‘70s, a cop or a teacher could afford a home there, as could my parents, a ship’s carpenter and a lab technician at the hospital. I lived in an honest to goodness ethnic neighborhood, reflected in my local elementary school. In the fourth grade, I became part of a town-wide academic program, my first contact with the rich and well-born from other schools. From then on, through high school, college, and work, I aspired to the behavioral paradigm of an older, posh girl with money, like Beppy or Winkie or Meg.

To come up to standard, a change in voice was in order. I spoke too loudly, with the Italian-American patois of my neighborhood, much imitated and mocked by children of wealth. My mother, herself gifted with a loud, deep voice, decided to coach me toward upward mobility with frequent jabs at my elocution. “Tone it down!” “Modulate, learn to modulate!” “Like fingernails on a blackboard already!”

Even as I ventured to sound and act more refined, I felt the urge to make art throughout high school. Sometimes I wrote, sang, and acted in strange little productions with like-minded friends, influenced by the Ionesco and Beckett taught to us by the incorrigible Mr. MacNiven. I think I heard the tiny chime of my own authentic voice in my junior year, but soon enough, it faded. My town and my mother had convinced me. I needed a new, better voice, not the screech I was born with.

∞

The poet Carl Phillips wrote about the poet’s authentic voice. A genuine voice of one’s own arises by “trusting the stranger in ourselves.” The stranger is the part that does not conform, that lives in exile from the rest of the village, that hides itself from the eyes those who fit in well with the society. The authentic voice, Phillips suggested, really matters in poetry. It is what makes work original—“unforgettable and impossible to confuse with any other voice.”

Phillips is a rarity—a poet with the courage to define poetic voice. The term is often used in essays for poets without definition, as if we simply know poetic voice when we hear it. When defined, as in didactic work, poetic voice is set of techniques that, somehow, conspire to produce a poet’s unique sound. For example, the glossary of the Academy of American poets define voice as: “the compound sum of employed poetic devices and grammatical rules associated with a particular poet’s literary style. It is what distinguishes poets from each other.” It’s not at all clear, though, how distinctiveness results from using poetic tools, like alliteration or meter, and knowing the rules of grammar.

Perhaps poetic voice isn’t something “known” in the proper sense of the word. Plato argues this point in the dialog, Ion. Here, a rhapsode—Ion—who recites Homer for the pleasure of Athenians, frustrates Socrates by his apparent lack of any skills and knowledge that would ostensibly be needed to produce art and define the artist. Socrates concludes that Ion “must be in our minds divine, and not an artist.” with poetry a kind of divine madness. The poet and friend of Cable Street, Ira Sadoff, has gone so far as to write an essay, “Hearing Voices: The Fiction of Poetic Voice.” Sadoff gives many reasons why “voice” in poetry is fictive. One of the most convincing is that what we call “voice” may be repetition of subject or syntax, putting the poet in danger of “limiting the sensibilities, their points of view, their stances” in the service of maintaining a distinctive style and the praise it has received.

Still, I can’t shake the idea in poetic voice is real, and worth cultivating. The poets I like best have very strong voices. A Simic poem is very clearly a Simic poem; part of the reason I go back to Simic to is hear that voice again and again. Certainly, repetition is involved: Simic always starts the line of his lineated with a capital letter, and he often writes about settings that evoke a feeling of emptiness. I have never found that this dulls the work or makes it predictable, any more than a wise observation loses its power because I hear it from an old friend.

I believe voice matters. At least for the time being, I accept Phillips definition of voice: authentic, original, completely distinctive, and driven by forms of nonconformity and social “exile” unique to each poet. I flesh out Phillips’ view with the poet Richard Hugo’s remarks that a poet’s vocabulary “is limited by your obsessions,” and “your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words.” Unique to me are my obsessions and triggers, their interplay, their relative force, and the experiences that provoked them. When I give them voice, I speak authentically. 

∞

I started writing poetry in 1985. My conscious motivation was convenience. I had a job in New York City where the joke was “if you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Sunday.” I could squeeze poetry into my few free hours, even getting a first draft done in half an hour. My unconscious motivation: I had moved to an Italian and Greek neighborhood in Queens, where I felt safer and more myself. My dry cleaner knew (and cared) that my family was Calabrese, and as a result called me “Testa Dura” (hard-head). “I know it’s you coming in, Testa Dura. Because I hear those high-heels clickin’, clickin’, clickin’ down the street.”

After about a year of writing, I began studying. I took workshops with Jeff Wright and Alice Notley at the St. Mark’s Place Poetry Project. In 1990, I became a student of Molly Peacock, a poet of beauty and a teacher of insight. Molly encouraged me many times to feel what I feel and hear what I hear while I write. In vain, because I simply could not be present with my own feelings and music, because I was trying to be present with the feelings and music—the voices—of others. Trying to be Peacock; trying to be Notley, Wright, Glück, Hirshfeld, Phillips, and Simic and every other poet I liked and knew wrote better than I did.

∞

Jane Hirshfield, I’ve learned, wouldn’t want me to take her voice. In fact, she would consider my attempt impossible, given how poetry is made. She said in an interview:

I am stuck with my own history and proclivities, my own obsessions, as Richard Hugo would say—I am stuck with all the things that determine exactly how poems “come through” me. I would need a Jane Hirshfield soul and brain transplant to be able to inscribe in her voice.

I have no choice but to be me. No choice except my own voice. It’s taken 40 years, but I’m done throwing my own voice to the howling winds, while trying to catch the voice of another writer.

∞

I’m still in my hesitant early days of voice lessons.

The usual assignments—read other poets, keep a journal of beloved lines, write daily, free write, and use prompts—make the assumption that poets seek their own voices. That assumption hasn’t applied to me. I have done all those things to no avail, for the obvious reason that techniques to find my own voice won’t work to find someone else’s voice  The best I could do were reasonable facsimiles of other poets’ voices—some good enough to be published, but none capable of making me happy. Far from it. Proceeding this way hurt a lot. I attended a writer’s conference in Michigan in 2023, and during a workshop a poet sighed and said of her process, “If it hurts so much, why don’t I stop?”

That poet spoke my heart’s question. Except now I’m not asking, “Why don’t I stop?” I’m asking, “Why don’t I change?” So, in this moment, I have only one assignment. At least once day, I sit down with my journal. I write poetry. I breathe consciously. The minute I begin judging, censoring, calling up the style of a better poet, I stop. If I have time, I come back later, maybe at night, when fatigue blunts by analytical faculties.

I have no goal except to feel contented with the act of writing for more minutes a day. I remain vigilant to separate this feeling from any joy (or sorrow) arising from public reactions to my writing when it is workshopped, rejected, or published. Contentment during the act of writing is my sign that I am writing in my own authentic voice—just as it is for the teenage Simic of my imagination.

Here is a small poem I’ve written since beginning my new process. It was published recently in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, an online literary magazine.

∞

Charles Simic lived amid rubble as a young child. His city of Belgrade was bombed in 1944 by British and American aviators that included Richard Hugo. Simic’s authentic voice speaks from the rubble, calling to the smoking ruins of the city, knowing that “the high heavens were full of shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.” His authentic voice also speaks of an uneasy rescue as a teenage immigrant in New York and Chicago; it speaks of both the wonder and insomnia he carried into his long, good life in New Hampshire,

I grew up in a safe Connecticut town, trying to emulate the wealthy and better-bred. I never emigrated to another country, although I moved from Connecticut to New York and then, eventually, to St. Louis. My authentic voice will speak from the places I have been, the obsessions they provoked, and the stranger I am within their midst. It won’t be tossed aside in favor of imitation. My voice will be happy in its exile, and pleased to be itself.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Lothlorien Poetry Journal and editor Strider Marcus Jones for permission to reprint the poem “Physics.” Jones is also a contributor to Cable Street—click here to view his work.

Photo: Pixabay.

A Note on Sources

Hirshfield, Jane. [Interview by Ami Kay.] Pirene’s Fountain 6 (2007). Reprinted at: https://theuncarvedblog.com/2009/11/26/pirenes-fountain-jane-hirshfield-on-poetic-craft/. Accessed January 31, 2026.
Hugo, Richard. “The Triggering Town.” In: The Triggering Town, Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, 11-18.  New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Phillips, Carl. “The Coin of the Realm.”In: The Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, 233-244. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004.
Plato. Ion. Translated by Lane Cooper. In: Plato: Collected Dialogs, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 215-228. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Richard Hugo. “Letter to Simic Fron Boulder.” Chicago Review 42, no. 3/4, (1996): 191-193.
Sadoff, Ira. “Hearing Voices: The Fiction of Poetic Voice.” New England Review 14, no. 4 (1992): 221-232.
Simic, Charles. “The Trouble With Poetry.” In The Life of Images: Selected Prose, 125-130. New York, NY: Harper Collins EBooks, 2015.
Academy of American Poets Website. Glossary. https://poets.org/glossary/voice. Accessed January 31, 2026.

* * *