Who You?

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

    --Miles Davis

True, of course. And it’s even harder to sound like yourself if you’re a writer.

Which is probably counter-intuitive. It makes sense that it would take a whole lot of playing music before you started to sound like yourself, because music is always itself, and nothing else. You don’t use a musical instrument, or otherwise create sounds that rise and fall in recognizable and identifiable intervals, in regular or varying tempi, for any other reason except to make music. The only way you hear it is if someone (or some bird) deliberately makes it, and when you start to do it yourself, it’s because you heard someone else do it, and you liked it so much you wanted to do something like it.

You don’t use music to communicate that you’d like jelly on your peanut butter sandwich, or that you need to know how to get to the nearest railway station {“Plizz fondle my buttocks,” according to Monty Python’s Hungarian-English phrasebook).

So you keep on doing it, trying to sound like Oscar Peterson or Eddie Van Halen or Yo Yo Ma, until one of two things happens. Either you get pretty good at it, good enough that you do sorta sound like Oscar Peterson, good enough to give pleasure to yourself and maybe others, and you feel a sense of accomplishment. Or you get good enough to realize it’s not good enough. It doesn’t satisfy you any more. There’s got to be something else.

Miles Davis also famously said that there’s no such thing as a wrong note—it’s the note you play next that makes it right or wrong. And it’s the note you play after that either does or does not move you in the direction of playing like yourself.

Roy Eldridge, it’s said, started out trying to play like Louis Armstrong, realized he couldn’t, and turned his shortcomings into something he could build on—something that sounded like himself. Dizzy Gillespie heard that sound, and liked it, and tried and failed to sound like Eldridge—and it was the notes he played next that led him to his own unique voice. Same with Miles Davis and Dizzy.

How does this apply to poetry? I’ll digress a little (my favorite pastime) and bring up a different musical analogy: an interview I did with country singer Gene Watson for my book The New Country Music Encyclopedia. Watson’s hobby, when off the road, was auto body work, and he talked about that: “I’ve got a car sittin’ in my shop right now—well, actually it’s two cars. One was burned in front and the other was totaled out behind. So what I did was, I cut ‘em in two and put ‘em together…It’s probably stronger now than before it…before they were wrecked. That’s because I’m a critical person, and I know what I’m doing.

“If you’ll stop and think about it, when a car gets hit from behind, you don’t start working on the side of it. You start straightening it from behind. You try to re-create that accident in reverse. That’s how you fix a car.”    

I asked Watson if that could apply to music, too, and he thought about it for a minute. The temptation, when you’re asked a question like that, is to find a way to make the analogy work, but Watson knew better.

“No. Music’s just the opposite, or at least it should be. A lot of people have tried to stay on top by re-creatin’ the same effect, but I’m not interested in that. Once you hear a song, you’ve heard it. Once you see a movie, you’ve seen it.”

So how does Miles Davis’s maxim apply to poetry? A more interesting question is how it doesn’t.

Poetry uses the medium of words, and unlike musical notes, words are what we use to get jelly added to our peanut butter sandwich, to get directions to the railway station or to get our buttocks fondled.

So that should make it easier to sound like you, shouldn’t it? Words are, after all, what you use when you’re being you. So why is it so hard to sound like you?

Because there’s no such thing as you.

 Or at least, there is no single you. There is no one voice which is the voice of you.

The example I used to use with my freshman comp classes: You get involved with a Halloween prank that gets a little out of hand. Nothing terrible, but you end up getting arrested. It happened to me, when I was a freshman at Bard. There was an antique store out on the highway near the college that had a covered wagon out in front of it, and my friends and I decided it would be a great prank to hook it up to the back of my car and tow it back to campus. We didn’t reckon on the fact that there had been several break-ins, and the state police were staking the place out.

So…you’re arrested. You’re terrified, of course, if you are, as I was, a middle class white kid with no experience with the police. But maybe, if you’re like me, you’ve got a bit of white privilege going for you, and you don’t want your friends to see how scared you are, so you cop a bit of an attitude. But then you find yourself in front of a judge, and suddenly there’s a different you—contrite, humble, we’re just kids, we meant no harm, we’ll never do it again. Then your parents come and pick you up, and they pick up a different you. This one is all innocence—we really didn’t do anything, the cops were just picking on us, and anyway it wasn’t my fault, it was all my friends’ idea. Then the next day at school, you see your girlfriend who’s been thinking about breaking up with you anyway. And you are--as best as you can be--the voice of calm maturity, the guy she wants you to be. And then you see some of your friends who weren’t there but have heard about it, and suddenly a whole new you emerges – the cool guy, the swashbuckling rogue. Every one of these versions of you has his own vocabulary, his own inflections…his own voice. And you put on these voices, these personae, without even thinking about it.

In writing, there’s no such thing as not thinking about it. Every word, every line, every sentence, is a conscious decision.  And if you’re writing poetry, it involves even more conscious decisions, because you’ve got all that formal stuff to worry about.

And suddenly we’re back at sounding like Miles, or Eddie Van Halen, or Jacquelin du Pre. You don’t start writing poetry because you want jelly with your peanut butter, or you need to get to the railway station, or you’d like your buttocks fondled. Well, maybe that one, but it generally won’t work. You write it because you’ve read some poetry and it’s turned you on. And that influences where you start looking for a voice. If you were turned on by Charles Bukowski, you’re not likely to start writing poems in the style of Andrew Marvell. If it was Emily Dickinson, your first poems are not going to sound or look like Diane DiPrima, with little or no punctuation, one-word lines, and sentences that may extend over more than one stanza break.

So maybe there’s no getting away from it. The only way to find your way to you is to start by being someone who spoke to you, in words or music or clay or wattles or brush strokes, and work your way from that not-you back to you. Which may mean trying on a number of different versions of you.