Style and voice at the writer's workshop

Four of us--two women and two men--sat around talking after the writer's workshop.

Each of us had read a poem we'd written out loud sometime during the last two hours. Anybody who's read a poem he or she's written out loud in front of other people knows the feeling we were each feeling. 

Even if you've never had a drink in your life, you want one; even if you've never smoked a cigarette the idea of smoking a cigarette seems reasonable.

One of the women said, "you know, I'd really like to develop a style so that when someone reads one of my poems they recognize it as me."

"Do you mean a voice?," I said.

"O no" the other man poet said, "she has a voice, she most definitely has a voice."

The other woman agreed she had a voice, but might be lacking a style, if style is defined as writing the same poem over and over as is the practice of so many poets.

"A voice is one thing," she said, "she has a voice. Style's something else."  

We all sat there quietly while the sun was going down, thinking about style. We were each thinking about our own style, whether or not we had one, and the difference between style, if we had one, and voice, of which we each assured the other we each had.

Just before it was time to go, I wondered if the room would be quieter without us there. Maybe the sound a real poem makes is the silence of an unanswered question trying to find a voice. And that style is the ability to evoke that voice with words as close to the original as possible.