Hi Reader,

Greetings from Prince Edward Island, Canada!

I’m so lucky to be able to visit different places, and so glad that even in our globalized world, different places are still truly different from one another. The high mountains of the Rockies, where I was this July, and the rolling farmland and red-cliffed bays and long sandy beaches of PEI are unmistakably each their own.

We travel in large part because of differences — for the different landscape, light, food, culture. People still speak in different accents, there’s a different pace to the days, different music is played and enjoyed, different food is eaten.

As Eric and I have been working on our new poetry class–the Poetry of Silence and Voice (coming this fall!)–we’ve been reflecting on how it’s often difference—what makes a voice distinctive—that draws us to and excites us about literature.

“Writer’s voice” and “poetic voice” are terms that are often thrown around, but what’s really meant by them?

For us, “voice” is an expression of the writer’s distinct and unique personality, an expression of what is different, individual, unlike others. A writer’s voice might change over time, but in any body of work, the voice is a particular collection of rhythms, tones, images, concerns, perspectives. It’s why clichés, even if true, don't belong in great literature.

This distinctiveness is precisely what’s erased in a globalized world where the same corporations control what we use, eat, wear, see, hear. Distinctiveness is also lost when we write with AI or have AI edit our work. AI is a tool that threatens not only to smooth out our voice and thinking, but also to make people less adept at using their voices or their minds at all.

But threats to our individual voices and our ability to really think and speak for ourselves existed before AI, which, if new, is, after all, an expression of our 21st century industrialized culture.

Across history, individuals have often been encouraged to suppress their individuality to go along with the larger society. Children were raised for centuries in Western culture to be seen and not heard. Women, working class people, people of color, people of different religions and beliefs were silenced. Hierarchical cultures always try to diminish individual voices and control the narrative.

Even a traditional writing “workshop,” often edits out the distinctive parts of a piece of writing, so that everyone ends up sounding roughly the same.

Differences can feel scary, but those differences are essential and wonderful and regenerative.

If we can learn to encourage what's unique in us, the unique song that wants to come through us, we will be more alive, more vibrant. We need cultural diversity, environmental diversity, personal diversity.

One of the reasons literature is so powerful is that it's a force for individuality and difference.

As a teacher, I always want to encourage students to find their unique voice—that means listening to your unique experiences, developing confidence, and also becoming more skillful at using techniques to create the effects you want to create, and learning to refine and edit your own work.

I want to share one of my favorite poems—by one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins—that's exactly about difference and voice. In this poem, Hopkins celebrates the difference of ordinary things, even things that are often considered irregular, weird, or out of place.

Because Hopkins was a gay man writing at a time and in a culture when homosexuality was not even to be spoken of, his celebration of difference is all the more meaningful. Similarly, his attention to the beauty of even the overlooked aspects of the natural world is especially pointed because Hopkins was deeply concerned about industrialization and environmental destruction of his time.

It’s also important that the poem has its own unique voice and style, one that breaks with the poetic orthodoxies of his time. "Pied Beauty" not only uses the poet's unique "sprung rhythm," it's written in a variation of the sonnet form invented by Hopkins himself (the poem and each of its stanzas exactly ¾ as long as in a traditional sonnet), and its language is unusually rich with alliteration, assonance, and fresh phrasing.

Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

​
Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Even as the poem celebrates difference, impermanence, and individuality, it ends by acknowledging and praising the timelessness of the divine—what is outside of time and unites us all.

Though (perhaps from my own desire to do something different), I like to think of the last lines as reading:

She mothers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise Her.

Poetry reminds us that though the world can be complex and often difficult, it's also important to pause, notice, appreciate, and praise.

With thanks to you for being here, thanks to Eric, who talked with me about these ideas, and with love,
Nadia