On Tony Hoagland's The Art of Voice

Declan Ryan reviews Tony Hoagland's The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice, co-written with Kay Cosgrove, for Los Angeles Review of Books. "For all his talk of the hardship in defining voice, Hoagland goes about it admirably, taxonomizing several aspects that cohere across 12 short, approachable chapters," writes Ryan. More:

...This is a book written expressly for writing students, complete with writing exercises at the back to serve as homework, but it’s nonetheless worthwhile for a general, interested reader. The tone is, throughout, coaxing, benevolent, and enthused.

Hoagland breaks his discussion down along lines that seem eminently sensible and self-contained, no mean feat given how easily such a discussion might drift into condescending abstraction. He avoids this throughout, in fact, and if he’s guilty of anything, it’s of loving his subject too much. The language he uses to describe what voice can achieve in a poem is intimate and tender. His introduction frames the writer/reader relationship along the lines of an encounter or conversation: “When we commence reading a poem, we are starting a relationship, and we want that relationship to be with an interesting, resourceful companion.” He also flags up something to which he returns, at least allusively, later — the drift away from rhetoric or universality in modern American poetry toward a more intimate, conversational style, the “aliveness of voice” being “a special strength of American poetry in the last hundred years.”

Read on at LARB.