Holly Pester Hooks Poetry by Nat Raha and Verity Spott to an Analysis of 'Poet-Voice'

For the Poetry Society, UK poet and sound artist and scholar Holly Pester has penned a piece against "poet voice," with a focus on the prosodies of poets Verity Spott and Nat Raha. "[After] a succession of literary festivals I’ve heard poet-voice enough times to think that maybe there’s something about this common spoken tune that kindly coheres the voice of poets…? But, no." Pester also invokes thinking by Sara Ahmed, Lisa Robertson, and Simone Weil in this well-tuned piece. A snippet:

The study of delivery, as literally heard in the melodies of intonation and also delineated in the written flexes of prosody (and this for me is where it gets interesting) is caught between the discourse of formal analysis (see the many many close readings of prosodic form in free verse poetry) and the intuitively understood premises of expression (persona, character, style). In other words, the technical form of poetry is conjoint with the contingent manifestations of its social and bodily extensions.

It’s within this hybrid of analysis that I want to discuss delivery, and to hook observations of poetic composition to questions regarding the practices of speech-ridden citizens. In other words, I want to use a mode of prosodic analysis alongside and as a means to consider a citizen’s participation in public speech with a mind to all the privatised networks of language, linguistically organised power structures, and language-based systems of governance into which we speak. That is to say that while delivery is (or should be) coordinate with the mechanics of the poem as a formal aspect of the composition (line breaks and their discord with grammar for example), delivery is also inherent to the mechanics of thought that embody the pressures of being linguistic and how it feels to function in society; the nervous static of subjectivity or, as Lisa Robertson has termed it, “the movement of subjectivity in language”, is heard in intonation. So this is my stand against poet-voice, that it’s an opting out of putting yourself at stake within, and letting your voice get churned up by, the real-world materials of prosody and intonation, stress, pitch and cadence.

Read all of "The Politics of Delivery (Against Poet-Voice)" at the Poetry Society.