Kate Daniels

The question of the writer’s voice framed a series of remarkable talks by a group of poets and therapists assembled by Kate Daniels for the February, 2015 New Directions weekend. A poet, director of creative writing at Vanderbilt University, and New Directions graduate and writing instructor, Kate framed the theme of the weekend in her opening talk:

Writers, but particularly creative writers, are obsessed with the question of voice in writing… voices we admire and might like to emulate. …We long to hoist ourselves above the scribbling hoards by creating our own remarkable, unique voice in our writing, something that is as identifiable and natural to us as our own fingerprint or the smell of our own sweat. …What exactly we mean by writer’s voice, however is not so apparent. There is certainly something distinctive about a writer’s actual words on a page, a writer’s ability to create a convincing facsimile of an identifiable speaking voice… But writer’s voice is not just about this … not just style. A fundamental aspect of writer’s voice precedes the words on the page, for writer’s voice also has something to do with the permission that we give ourselves to write and to lay claim to our own experience. To find one’s voice as a writer is to come into relationship with oneself and the world… That’s our topic, as mysterious, ineffable, and inarticulatable as it is.

The weekend’s first guest speaker was Jim Gorney, a psychoanalyst in practice in Knoxville, Tennessee with a graduate degree in creative writing. In his talk, which can be seen in its entirety here,

Gorney drew from literature, case material, personal history, popular history, and music. In its composition, the paper was a powerful demonstration of writing as a practice of carefully developed skills brought to life by the author laying claim to his unique experiences. The talk explored the critical importance for adolescents of having access to a creative process of playfully projecting themselves into a potential space. It is a space into which they can project the dreams that allow them to lay claim to their adult lives.

Delmore Schwartz

Gorney demonstrated his thesis by mapping two journeys into potential space – a literary text and a clinical encounter. He read to us from Delmore Schwartz’s short story, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Gorney described how Schwartz attempted to use the short story as potential space. In framing his clinical example, Gorney drew from Masud Khan’s argument that clients use the analytic space as a potential space to sustain moods and play with potential psychic experiences that their ego capacities cannot yet actualize. To demonstrate the promise of this view, Gorney provided a case example of a patient, Ann, who was finally able to use Gorney as a transitional object and the consulting room as “a potential place of play and field of illusion” (Gorney quoting from Andre Green, On Private Madness). In his exciting and altogether unexpected conclusion, Gorney took us back to Delmore Schwartz. Describing Schwarz as ultimately unable to free himself from persecutory parent introjects and therefore unable to fulfill his early great potential as a writer or to assume adult responsibility, Gorney nevertheless redeemed Schwartz through a description of the dream space he was able to provide as a teacher for his students, including the musical great Lou Reed and Jim Gorney himself.

Jim Gorney

Jim Gorney also provided Friday night’s talk, this one entitled, “The Psychosis of Everyday Life”, in which he once again demonstrated the importance of creating a transitional space of play in the analytic office, this time in the treatment of clients who are exhibiting what he characterized as “transitory psychosis.” Drawing from Levine, Reed and Scarfone’s Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning, Gorney described clinical work in which the patient’s capacity for narrative story telling has collapsed, leaving the analyst reliant on the use of spontaneous, counter-transference responses that may strengthen the presence of weak or potential representations and make them more legible. This, he stated, requires feeling or imagining what the patient may not yet feel or know. Citing object relations, he named this work as “creating an imaginative transitional space in order to put some play into the false certainties of emerging madness.” Gorney illustrated this principle through a case example in which Gorney’s own unpremeditated eruption into narrating the plot of a movie – made up on the spot – served to illustrate the chaotic emotional state which the patient had been unable to symbolize. Providing us with the same impassioned narration he made to the patient, Gorney’s demonstrated the power of immediacy and urgency, not only in clinical treatment but also in captivating an audience through writing.

Owen Lewis and Cynthia Ezell

Cynthia Ezell and Owen Lewis shared the stage for our first Saturday talk. They both took up the theme of voice in writing as related to finding some resonance with a feeling of authenticity in one’s life. Ezell, a graduate of the New Directions program and psychotherapist in Knoxville, described finding some of that sense of authenticity as having to do with “a sense of place as a somatic experience, sensation in the body, a deep kind of knowing,” which she described as “a kind of midwife to the writer.” Here is Ezell describing her writing practice as it resides in her 50 acre farm:

Doubtless drawing from the Southern writing traditions of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty and so many more, Ezell describes “mercy” as a part of her experience of writing, both exercising mercy toward herself and experiencing mercy through the act of writing:

I keep returning to writing like a woman returning to a lover, a lover to whom I can’t quite commit but neither can I give up. Each time I reengage my writing practice, there’s passion and purpose. I can’t believe I ever stopped. It feels so good and so gratifying. ‘This time,’ I tell myself, ‘I’m going to see the project through. I’m going to finish the book.’ And then those niggling bits of doubt and fear nudge themselves between me and the beloved and the writing waits. I abandon my writing practice for one main reason. It’s not that I don’t have time. I think we all have time to write if we really want to. It’s that I’m afraid. For starters I’m afraid of calling myself a writer, claiming the activity and the identity. …I’m afraid of criticism. …Do I write what I want to write? Do I tell the story I want to tell? Or do I play it safe? Should I be more cautious and guarded? Should I make an effort to impress? All of that feels too familiar. It felt too much like a regression into the straight jacket of fundamentalism. So I just keep on writing about things that I know, things that I experience in the small, rural community in which I live. Things like goat farming, field dressing wild turkeys, castrating lambs, burials, baptisms. In order to have a writing life I would have to live the life I wanted to live and write what I wanted to write.

Owen Lewis

Owen Lewis, professor in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University, picked up on Jim Gorney’s Friday theme of the adolescent using potential space to imagine her/himself into adult responsibility to make a slightly different point. As a physician and psychoanalyst who wrote as a young adult but then gave it up as he moved into the responsibilities of adult life, Lewis began writing poetry again after a 25-year hiatus. In the wake of a difficult divorce, he described taking up poetry again as being something that could be his own, that he didn’t have to lose. In a musing that I imagine many of us could appreciate, Lewis said,

If we think about transition, like an adolescent, who thinks that time is going to go on forever, what would end time at this stage for me, having three kids who are well launched, career, lots of opportunities through my career…? The end game is of course dying, but since I, like most of us, am in denial that we’re actually ever going to die, I’m in this time that can go on forever, where I’m not encumbered by real life. Being a responsible person is easy once you’ve done it for a few years, so my daily hours at my desk are cultivating irresponsibility in a certain way.

Elizabeth Spires — poet, children’s author, and Professor of English at Goucher College, took up the challenge of defining voice prior to her analysis of voice in poetry. Here, she describes what she means by voice.

Spires suggested that when a poet or writer comes into her/his own voice, one of two things can happen. She provided examples of one path, in which poets developed voices that are immediately definable. She also argued, using Eudora Welty’s short story “Where is the Voice Coming From?”, that a writer can be inhabited or taken unawares by “a voice not our own,” a voice that can take us with no planning or conscious choice of our own.

Stevem Cramer

Steven Cramer, poet and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Lesley University, also offered a perspective on multiple writer voices, stating,

Often when we use the word “voice”, we mean the writer’s signature style, that which allows us to distinguish one writer from another. But a writer’s style comes from constant trial and error. And we often recognize that style precisely from the unique way it orchestrates many different voices or tones. Inexperienced writers often strive for a consistent tone in their voice, which they confuse for authenticity or honesty, but all too often translates to a monotone, an absence of adventure in diction and syntax and finally, very little in the way of aesthetic discoveries that lead to psychological discovery. And when we think more deeply about it, consistency of tone on the page doesn’t make a very plausible claim for realism. The voices we employ in life constantly vary and sometimes conflict.

In his newest book of poetry, Clangings, Cramer provides a dramatic example of striving for a voice that is anything but monotone. He draws on the phenomenon of “clang association”, defined as speech that is composed of “mental connections made between dissociated ideas through rhymes, puns, neologisms and other non-linear speech”, which sometime occurs in the speech of psychotics. Cramer described the impact of his discovery of this speech on his poetry by saying, “The resourcefulness, energy and wit enacted in the examples acted as shots of adrenalin to my imagination which had been casting about for something new. At that point I should say ‘desperate for something new.’”

Cramer took on the persona of a person who manifested clanging in the writing of his latest book of poems, drawing from actual speech examples and his own free associations to allow the sounds and juxtapositions of language and flights of unexpected association to guide his writing:

I’ve never been so indifferent to what a poem might mean. I cared about what it did, what discoveries it would make on its own and how it sounded. …If the reader could believe in this persona, then he could say things that don’t make sense, but still cohere emotionally.

Cramer concluded by reading several poems to us, including this, the first poem in the collection:

Kate Wechsler

What was it that made for such an energizing and inspiring weekend? Perhaps it was that every talk was beautifully crafted. Maybe it was the presence of so many poets and writers whose deep love of beautiful writing was on constant display. Perhaps most compelling for me was what Kate Wechsler made clear in the audience discussion with Jim Gorney – that the energy of the weekend had a great deal to do with what Jim invited us to the very first day: to use our time, space, and community as a transitional space, a playground in which we could project dreams and imagine desired potentials.