The Voice You Hear

Dmitry Ageev

The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently

The voice you hear when you read silently

is not silent, it is a speaking-

out-loud voice in your head; it is spoken,

a voice is saying it

as you read. It's the writer's words,

of course, in a literary sense

his or her "voice" but the sound

of that voice is the sound of your voice.

Not the sound your friends know

or the sound of a tape played back

but your voice

caught in the dark cathedral

of your skull, your voice heard

by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts

and what you know by feeling,

having felt. It is your voice

saying, for example, the word "barn"

that the writer wrote

but the "barn" you say

is a barn you know or knew. The voice

in your head, speaking as you read,

never says anything neutrally--some people

hated the barn they knew,

some people love the barn they know

so you hear the word loaded

and a sensory constellation

is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,

hayloft, black heat tape wrapping

a water pipe, a slippery

spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,

the bony, filthy haunches of cows...

And "barn" is only a noun--no verb

or subject has entered into the sentence yet!

The voice you hear when you read to yourself

is the clearest voice: you speak it

speaking to you.

Thomas Lux

I’ve got a little collection of poem poems – that’s what I’ll call them – poems about poetry itself, writing, or in this case, reading (poetry, I’m going to say, because poetry is the voice I am most aware of), that I’m going to be posting in the next while. This could be considered overkill – like songs about singing or writing about writing, but think about it a moment: a man sees something in his mind, he makes little black squiggles on a piece of paper, another person scans these, and “hears” himself seeing the things in the other man’s mind. It’s crazy. How on earth is this possible? It’s not just that we see what the other man sees, it’s that he has become our voice, which is to say, he has become part of us, and we a part of him, we begin to hear ourselves through him. A part and yet apart. Add to this the fact that this person might be 100 years gone, and yet be spilling the treasures dearest to my heart, the secret thoughts I recognized the moment I heard myself speaking them. Extraordinary. Something to write poems about. 

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