been thinking abt this a lot. A poetry professor once told me every poet has a particular emotion from which they write. It’s not what they write about, but what emerges from the writing. For instance, louise gluck posits that Richard Siken’s central emotion is panic. Even though the word is never spoken to or about, the poems are saturated with it. I think Mary Oliver can be characterized by relief. Anyway, i think having that recognizeable Emotion is a major mark of poetic voice & it’s development
expanding on this a bit more, of course it is reductive. But this is not to say a poet only portrays one emotion full stop. It is more that the poet writes through one emotion, writes within it. The emotion the landscape and other emotions act within or upon it.
To use Siken again (because i am re-reading Crush so his poetry is fresh on my mind), to say that Crush is about Panic is Not to say that panic is the only emotion in the book. Far from it. Siken labors in love, in fear, in grief, in pain, in tenderness. But each of these emotions (and all the others) operate as a function of the underlying mania Crush presents. I won’t quote (you should read Gluck’s foreword if you want a good example of what i mean), but i will say that where love is, it is a frantic insistance or pleading; where tenderness is, is is caged and desperate; where grief, a tireless explaining away. Crush presents a series of emotions which all seem to look away from themselves, to try and redirect, because beneath them is that unspoken Panic.
That is what i’m talking about by the One Emotion. & im certain it changes across an authors work as they change themselves, but look across a well developed Period of an author’s work (a chapbook, a book, a time-period of writing, the body of their work) and you find that singularity.
& i really do think that being able to identify an emotional current which is seperate (though not completely detached) from the Subject of a poem/body of work is a signature of a developed Voice and a mark of poetic maturity
I love this
Never thought of it this way but it’s so true.
