World Class Poetry Blog

The 6 Appeals Of Poetic Voice
13 June 2008, the poet @ 8:23 pm

Sitting around thinking again, I counted 6 ways that a poet can appeal to a reader through voice. These are what I would call The 6 Voice Appeals:

1. Emotion - People are, at the core, emotional beings. To appeal to your reader’s emotions, you need only charge your poetry with emotional trigger words or infuse it with heightened language and imagery, much the way the Romantic poets did. The Romantics were extremely interested in producing emotional catharsis. But to appeal to a reader’s emotions you don’t have to go to that extreme. It’s all in the language and tone of your poetry.
2. Intellect - Some poems are not appeals to emotion at all. Rather, they make their appeals to the intellect. The Metaphysical poets were good at this and it has come into fashion again with contemporary poetics. Many poets prefer to induce thought with their poetry and to do this effectively you’ve got to provide your readers with some sort of philosophical anchor or present an idea that you explore through craft and language.
3. Grammatical - A grammatical appeal relies upon the poet’s ability to style language in such a way that words are the focus. The focus isn’t so much on intellectualizing an idea or forcing emotional catharsis but on the enjoyment of hearing the sound of words or highlighting the ways that words and language can work together or against each other.
4. Punctuating/Orthographic - The punctuating or orthographic appeal involves the use of symbols such as the copyright symbol or ampersand, signs, and punctuation marks to show how language can be manipulated through the use of these symbols. Many of E.E. Cummings’ poems and other avant garde poets have used orthography to great effect and Cummings often inserted parenthetical clauses in odd or unexpected places.
5. Visual - Both grammatical and punctuating, or orthographic, poetry can be visual, but a visual appeal is not limited to the intricacies of language and symbol. A visual appeal can also be made through the structure of a poem itself. A poem shaped as a cross or in the form of a circle, for instance, might illustrate the concept that a poet is trying to make in the language of the poem. A visual appeal can be anything that relies upon the reader actually reading the poem, as opposed to hearing it read, and involves the use of visual images or words used as images to have their effect. Aram Saroyan is one poet in recent times who has made visual appeals in his poems.
6. Anthropological - An anthropological appeal is an attempt to show how people or things relate. The purpose is not to intellectualize or emote over relationships. The concern is not with feelings or the mind, but with the actual physical, spiritual, psychological, or other relationship between two entities. It can involve cross-cultural experiences or intra-cultural relations.

There could, of course, be some overlap in these appeals, but I’d argue that all poems fall under at least one of these appeals. The reference is to voice, not necessarily the author’s intent or subject matter. The voice is the tone and language of a poem. It is the persona within the poem. When I say that the voice appeals to the reader in a certain way, I am referring to the actual point the speaker is attempting to make through his/her voice. The appeal is what that voice is attempting to accomplish through the poem’s language and tone.

When you write your poems, it is important to think about what your voice will be. Who is the speaker? What does she want? Who is she appealing to and how will she make her appeal? By answering those two questions on appeal - who and how - you then begin to define your poem’s voice and its end goal.

2 Comments a “The 6 Appeals Of Poetic Voice”

1. Jim Murdoch — June 14, 2008 @ 3:55 am
   

   Strange, considering the amount of time you devoted to religious poetry that you missed ’spiritual’ off your list.

2. the poet — June 14, 2008 @ 8:50 am
   

   Jim, I’d consider spiritual appeals to fall under either ‘emotional’ or ‘intellectual’. When you get right down to it, faith is a response to a person’s intellectual core or his emotional core. If people believe in God, or a supernatural power of some sort, they do so for emotional or intellectual reasons, and many times both. So I tried to frame these definitions as broadly as possible within a minimalist framework.

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