When voices matter

Some voices you hear for as long as you live, and some you forget the moment you hear them.

I still hear the voice of a man in Great Falls, Montana, interviewing me for a job I didn't get, who reading my 'resume' saw that I'd written and published a few poems. He asked me, 'what kind of poets do you read and admire?' I answered, 'minor poets.' He too admired minor poets, 'the best kind' he said.

I can still hear what the man in Great Falls said to me, though I can't hear the sound of his voice. Or rather his voice became the words he said, the words I still remember, so there's no need for the sound of it.

Next door, two people, a man and a wife, are building a small wall in their backyard. I can hear their voices through my open window. I know it wil be the most poorly built wall in the world, not because I can hear what they're actually saying or that I know them well or know anything myself about building walls, but because I can hear in the sound of their voices that they don't really want to build the wall, they feel it's a burden to be building it, that it's beneath them somehow. 

I look out my window and see them, the man and wife, building a wall. They're right in front of me now, I can hear every word they're saying. But as soon as I turn away I can't remember a thing of what they've said.

A writer can't write anything about voices he or she can't hear. James Wright, a major American poet many think minor, a minor poet by his own reckoning, wrote about his writing, "All I am trying to do is to learn how to write old-fashioned prose, and I hope it is plain. Of course, what I really mean is that I am trying to balance language itself with my experience of the intractable world and, in that balance, ring a kind of chime."