I've been thinking about voice, particularly since writing is so much of what I do now on a daily basis--not just the poems or blog, but writing for different websites with different needs and entirely different audiences. There is the online lesson work, which is more formal and academic, with the Worthpoint dictionary entries being very similar, both in the research aspect and the tone. Then there is the entertainment writing, which is newsier in tone, with a little bit of editorializing, but less formal. Then the real estate neighborhood guides, which make me sound a little like a tourist brochure. And then there is what I was describing as "lifestyle" voice, which uses words like :"cozy" and "gorgeous." This voice is, of course, what I use for House Digest, and also the blogs I've been writing for Cozymeal. Somewhere in the middle of all these things is this space, this voice. Which is somewhere between more informal writing and poems or essays that are more creative. The poems are somewhere way at the other end of the forest and require an entirely different kind of thinking and expression.
The one thing I feared, and the reason I perhaps avoided writing for income was the fear that the paid world would take all the words with nothing left for me. In the end, I didn't care, honestly because the alternative, staying at the library, was worse than having the poems dry up. The poems, while nice, would not help me survive. Or pay the bills. Or get out of a terrible, stress-addled existence. The poems were, it sounds terrible to say, negotiable. Which of course, a horrible thing--to think of letting go of them, something rather important to my sense of self. But I could if I had to if not doing so meant the alternative. And its not like I wouldn't be writing something.
Thankfully, it was not even an issue, the brain I use to write for other things and the brain I use for poetry not even sharing the same planet sometimes let alone the same resources. It might be different if I was a prose writer, just word counts alone would be problematic. On a given day I write anywhere from 3000-5000 words of various things, not including here. My poems are pretty short. The entire manuscript of AUTOMAGIC came in at less than a 10,000 words total and exactly 100 pages. And it was written over the course of several years on and off.
So tonight, I don my blogging hat. This after donning my editing and curating hat for a while tonight, which is maybe a whole other shape, but one that does not involve putting words to the page I am planning on editing and revising some of the pieces in a bit I've written recently in the project I do not yet have a tile for--the more personal, romantic oriented poems, which of course, require me to be a different voice, a different shape, than the more narrative, story-driven work of AUTOMAGIC I was editing last week.
So, really, within even just poetry, we are many different creatures all at once.
