A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Thirteen

While I am still puzzling through what it is that I see happening in my work lately, I am stuck by the consideration of a certain irony, one that is not original to my thinking, but which I don't believe I truly understand before.  This is to do with the idea of voice, and with many of the ideas I have been discussing recently, and is fairly simple to explain.  In my recent experiences, I found how difficult it is to escape one's voice, even when handicapped by found material, or otherwise limited in a way that would seem to stifle that quality, it still remains.  It is impossible to get away from it.  Of course, as a writer, particularly as a poet, my goal is to go past what I can do, and to expand my voice, in a deep sense, but that becomes a contradiction, of course, when one cannot escape that aspect of identity.

So, in a certain sense, a writer is a prisoner of their voice and can never get beyond it, but within that, when one really discovers it, their is a liberation which occurs.  As I mentioned yesterday, though I didn't think of it that way, I feel that much of the work I was doing was constrained by rules that had kept me on a certain course, ideas that were about my writing and my poetry, and those ideas were and are valid, but were still limiting.  The reason, though, that they remained was a lack of trust in myself, in the idea that I knew how to write the poem without them.  In discovering that the voice is inescapable, I am freed from the effort of attempting to maintain rules intended to keep that quality in my work.

I am certain this will be a continual process, though.  While I am now aware of how to move past certain limits, it is worth realizing I never saw those limits before, only followed them intuitively.  Now, I am sure that limits still exist which I have yet to notice.  Like so much else in this journey, I sense a cycle that will be renewing and expanding, one where my work renews itself through the recognition of what I had accepted as true before, without even knowing it. 


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