Word Voice Body

As an article or essay that I am writing is nearing completion, I take the essential step of reading it aloud to myself. I have found that this practice helps me identify phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that feel awkward in the mouth, which I then imagine to be awkward in the ear of the readers. In the ear of the readers? Readers read with their eyes. But I have come to know, to feel, that when writing truly works, comes alive on the page, a reader is listening as well as seeing, hearing my voice. It is so very easy when writing to get lost in/entranced with one's ideas. Writing, especially professional writing as most of us have been trained to do it, can so easily fall into expressions of disembodied intellect—words on a page, thoughts with no voice, ideas with no body.

I have known that my sense and experience of writing have been deeply influenced by my experience of poetry—not only of reading poetry but also hearing it spoken by the poet. As a student at Reed College in the late '60s, I had the opportunity to hear Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and other Beat poets read their work. Photographs of these poets hang on the wall in my office to remind me of what it means to listen, to write, to speak, and to stand outside the borders of the normative. Theirs were voices of challenge—whispering, laughing, shouting, weeping, protesting—so resonant and alive.

The structure and form of contemporary poetry is, in part, an effort to create on the page the quality of the voice. Stanza is derived from the Latin for room, and the stanzas of a poem are like separate rooms that a reader is invited into, a place to pause and listen. The line breaks mirror and evoke the pauses in the breath and the voice as one speaks. In hearing (and seeing) a poem read aloud, the “rooms,” the words, and the pauses on the page reverberate in the ear and through the body.

Recently, I heard an interview with the Vietnamese-American poet and author Ocean Vuong, entitled “A Life Wort