What is Voice?

The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently — by Thomas Lux

is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her voice, but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word barn
that the writer wrote
but the barn you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally — some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows. . . .
And barn is only a noun — no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.


I love Thomas Lux generally and invite you all to check out more of his poetry.

The concept of voice is a difficult one to wrap our heads around in writing. It is abstract because its a metaphor. Text does not physically talk. We can boil voice down to characteristic style, but I think we miss something metaphorically when we do that. Many people know the feeling of not being able to put their voice in their writing, just as many of us know the feeling of being silenced when wanting to speak. It's that emotional connection that the "voice" metaphor catches and style just can't. We struggle in academic writing to adapt our voices to be like the voices of people in our discipline, and we sometimes feel we slip. our impersonation doesn't work. Someone caught on to our home accent. Training our voices to perform in different ways is important to maintaining our sense of attachment to our writing. If we are always feeling like imposters, we will never feel connected to what we write. So we practice. We write in our many different voices and we try on new voices until they can become our own too. But we should resist feeling silenced.

Oh, check out the link to the right on "levels of abstraction." The details we use help us connect to our voices.