God Save Donald Duck, Vaudeville and Variety
The Kinks, where have you been all my life?
Wrote a poem titled "Miracle Bubbles" this late morning, the titular bubbles being those bubbles that come in a cheap plastic yellow, red, or turquoise bottle, which you blow into being from a tiny wand, and soon your hands are sticky with soap and you get a head rush from so much outrushing of your breath, the more so when you're eight. I'd be the last one to deny that it's a mess, but its voice is exactly the voice I've been struggling to maintain over the last few days of slushing through student work, coughing, coughing, not writing, and surveying my MFA-less future. How can I define this voice? Well, it's bound up in a whole lexicon of graduate student words I don't feel like using here, because I realized this morning in the midst of teaching an Gloria Steinem essay on advertising in women's magazines that the students didn't understand my question. For example, one lad was heard to say, "I don't understand your question." I suspect that this happens more often than I'm wont to admit. Not that I'm thinking on a hugely further level than my students are; hardly. They're all bright in their own ways. Rather, I might take such occurences and wonder if indeed I know exactly what I'm saying myself, and what question I'm posing. Brevity being a virtue and all that.
This tangent is beside the point, the point being as I reread the first few meandering lines of this post the nature of this "voice." And I think that the easiest way to sum it up is that it strives for a momentum via an extended syntax, an intact sentence structure, and a linguistic variety. In terms of subject matter, the personal and the public appear in equal measure. The "I" probably waxes nostalgic and philosophical riffs might be heard; Donald Duck, vaudeville, china cups and virginity may make cameos. But am I really talking about "voice" anymore, however? "Voice" seems like an increasingly blurred term whenever I try to define it, much less my own, and I wonder how useful a term it is. How to tell the dancer from the dance, and all that (Yeats).
Wrote a poem titled "Miracle Bubbles" this late morning, the titular bubbles being those bubbles that come in a cheap plastic yellow, red, or turquoise bottle, which you blow into being from a tiny wand, and soon your hands are sticky with soap and you get a head rush from so much outrushing of your breath, the more so when you're eight. I'd be the last one to deny that it's a mess, but its voice is exactly the voice I've been struggling to maintain over the last few days of slushing through student work, coughing, coughing, not writing, and surveying my MFA-less future. How can I define this voice? Well, it's bound up in a whole lexicon of graduate student words I don't feel like using here, because I realized this morning in the midst of teaching an Gloria Steinem essay on advertising in women's magazines that the students didn't understand my question. For example, one lad was heard to say, "I don't understand your question." I suspect that this happens more often than I'm wont to admit. Not that I'm thinking on a hugely further level than my students are; hardly. They're all bright in their own ways. Rather, I might take such occurences and wonder if indeed I know exactly what I'm saying myself, and what question I'm posing. Brevity being a virtue and all that.
This tangent is beside the point, the point being as I reread the first few meandering lines of this post the nature of this "voice." And I think that the easiest way to sum it up is that it strives for a momentum via an extended syntax, an intact sentence structure, and a linguistic variety. In terms of subject matter, the personal and the public appear in equal measure. The "I" probably waxes nostalgic and philosophical riffs might be heard; Donald Duck, vaudeville, china cups and virginity may make cameos. But am I really talking about "voice" anymore, however? "Voice" seems like an increasingly blurred term whenever I try to define it, much less my own, and I wonder how useful a term it is. How to tell the dancer from the dance, and all that (Yeats).
posted by Wil at
1:07 PM
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