I first encountered the term “the speaker,” in reference to poetry, at a graduate writing workshop. One of my fellow students said, “the speaker seems angry here” and “I’m not sure what the speaker means with this statement.” It took me a minute to realize that she meant the voice of the narrator in the poem, not its actual writer. I also learned that it was bad form to refer directly to “you” when critiqueing a poem. Using “the speaker” removed the personal sting from telling another student that their poem had a problem or was confusing, or, heaven forbid, needed substantial rewriting.
Is this vaguely named “speaker” a persona, narrator, voice, or all three?
The answer is yes, no, and, well, sort of. The “speaker” in a poem is or isn’t the writer, could be multiple entities, a persona invented just for the poem, or a version of the writer from the past, etc. There are endless possibilities.
Even if the speaker is clearly discernible as the writer herself, the act of creating the poem changes that role. Poets labeled “confessional”—i.e, Plath, Sexton, Lowell, and Snodgrass—still employ speakers in their poems. The “I” of a so-called confessional poem is a transformed voice, chosen based on the topic, mood, and the poet’s willingness to expose details of her private life. The poet may or may not be aware of this transformation, but nevertheless it exists.
It’s remarkable that in my research on the many topics on the subject of creative writing, I rarely come across opinions about the role of the speaker. And yet the speaker guides us through the poem, sets the tone for the work, and is the very soul of the poem. Observer or participant, reliable or unreliable—the structure of the work depends on its voice. Imagine describing an aria without commenting on how the singer performed.
Writers anguish over finding their “voice.” What they really mean is, do I sound authentic in this work? Do I sound like the “me” I’m trying to develop, and not like someone who influenced me or who I might be unconsciously imitating? And, most importantly, did I create a speaker who communicates successfully through this poem?
Some of this confusion comes from comparing poetry to fiction or memoir. In fiction, we expect to have a narrator or series of narrators, whether in first or third person, who tells us a story. In memoir, it’s almost always the voice of the writer describing a time in her life. But poetry isn’t fiction or memoir. It’s an entirely different genre. As Denise Levertov put it in “The Nature of Poetry:” “Poetry is a way of constructing autonomous existences out of words and silences” and “Most poetry is more directly derived from the unconscious than most prose.”
I love how she mentions silences as being as important as words.
When writing early drafts of a poem, I don’t consciously create a speaker. The speaker emerges through subsequent drafts. The voice that ends up narrating the poem is often a surprise to me, and quite different from the voice I started with. This is one of the reasons I love writing poems: when I start one, I honestly never know where I will end up. The journey is just as important as the destination. Or maybe more important.
Have you given any thought to the role of the speaker in the poems you write? If so, please share your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!
From the Academy of American Poets: a definition of the speaker in a poem.
From the New York Times, “In a Poem, Just Who Is ‘the Speaker,’ Anyway?”
