Issue 36: Adam Piette

Denise Riley, A Chorus of Ears: On 'the voice of the poem' (London: Picador, 2026)

Peter Riley, About Poetry, ed. Kelvin Corcoran (Swindon: Shearsman, 2026)

Bernadette Mayer, The Vancouver Manuscript (London: Distance No Object, 2026)

Sara Nicholson, Honesty (London: Distance No Object, 2026)

A voice comes to you in the dark. It is and is not yours. It speaks your language, but in a foreign tongue (which you understand, though). It arranges itself into patterns only discernible at rest, when you have time for close enough attention; but runs as if with no aforethought. It can mimic other voices, can speculate as if in the heat of thinking, but has a strange, distorting nonsense to it that accompanies its sense-making. It can weather its own interruptions, breaks and leaps, thrives off dissonance and broken syncopations, yet has its own harmonics, counterpoints, shapely logic. But that logic is untrackable as it happens, and dubious in its aftermath, as though you might be imposing order in retrospect for the sake of some peace of mind. That's if you remember correctly at all: the dream of it fades so quickly. Annotating it on the fly is possible only at considerable cost, as though the improvisatory feel of it has to be jettisoned with the notebook there, however swift the dictation-transcription. And yet some transcribing gets the voices down on the page, nevertheless, if you're lucky: as poems, as captured art-object-as-language. And there's the clue: it may very well be language that is 'authoring' the voices, not the sovereign poet-self. How language becomes voice is a post-Romantic mystery perhaps. The language of the poem flows from an unknown source, but it is a source that has words always as its element, words which shape themselves to the inwardness of the compositional mind and body as though they 'knew' that inwardness would be just so and there just so from the very start. This spooky possession is allowable as inspirational only insofar as the breath is one of the homes of the words-as-inwardness; and breath only admissible as 'ours' once let go of and manifest outside the body-home as text. Language is only in if it's out and about in the circumambient air, but with a characteristic air of knowing what it's always like 'inside'.

         These are some of the unsettling features of 'the voice of the poem' as thought through and caught, as if from the turbulent air, by Denise Riley in her 2024 Clark Lectures, four essays gathered together by Picador as A Chorus of Ears. The title indicates a further consideration: that the compositional matrix of language is most clearly discernible in the poem (and therefore demonstrably a language-effect) in its complex auditory textures; and that those textures present as though generated by a multiple set of voices, making the act of making necessarily transpersonal, by Riley's definition. This at once points back to Eliot and Waste Land chorale  and impersonality, and retunes these modernist notes as singing beyond New Critical theories (of the urn-like artwork, its aesthetic structures of feeling and ahistoricality issuing through and by the I-voice) towards a theory of lyric that is radical, other-oriented, Language Poetry-inflected, dissolutional of a theatrical poet-self and her limelight. The first essay, 'The inhuman aspect of lyric poetry', stresses more the impersonality of the poem than that of the poet, as a corrective to Eliot, arguing 'how, in a world of noise, a modern quasi-anonymity could conduct itself as an amended version of impersonality – pertaining not only to the writer, but to the poem itself in its solitary standing' (3). The anonymity conducts itself within the poet, Riley goes on to say, as an '"outerness" of language [...] in the head's privacy' (13). The poet allows this to happen not as passive vehicle, but in order to maximise the intricacies of the soundscape and shapings:

From the side of the poem, her dispossession could allow its exuberance, leaping ahead of her in its tics of echolalia, its tuberous branchings underground, its musicality, crucially including cadence, among other strong powers of prosody. (13)

The musicality is enacted in this poet's prose: note the ways the phonemes of 'exuberance' are rearranged in 'echolalia'-'tuberous'-'cadence'-'prosody'; how the 'its' of the poem chimes through 'tics', 'tuberous branchings', 'musicality'; how the phrases from 'tics' to 'prosody' have both chiasmic rhythm (3-4-2-3-4 beats) and cadential emphasis in the ways the final p-run in 'powers of prosody' works in concert with its voiced twin, the b-run, 'exuberance', 'tuberous', 'branchings', to bring the long sentence to a close for the ear. The sound-effects and rhythms being produced are defined in the very statement of them as echolalia and tuberous branchings underground, so nonsensically alien, compulsively repetitive,  inhumanly rootlike, yet full of life. None of these sound-effects and rhythmical shapings were intended, doubtless: all the more reason to acknowledge Riley's main point, that language has powers of prosody the properly listening and transcribing poet lets herself be possessed by. The talks here are as lively to the ear as prose can be, the dance of the intellect among words revised as dance of the language among its words, logopoeia fusing with melopoeia; an enacting of the ways the 'rustling anonymity of the speech of the "outside"' mingles with 'the differently sounded anonymity of the "inside", or interior speech' (13-14). Riley as practitioner reveals some of the compositional processes by which her poetry has been made: a deliberate openness to the transpersonal voices generated by the language machine coming from out there; that maintains the namelessness of inner brain chatter, conceived as equally other. This fusion of langue and parole is doubly anonymous, therefore: Not I, the poem says; Me Neither, the poet chimes in, a Beckettian doubly unnamable act that has exuberance as one of its liveliness-aims.

         The essays fortify their premises and hunches with engagements with German Romantic philosophy, finding in Schelling, Hegel, Fichte and Kleist intimations of the self-division and transpersonal possession-by-language she tracks in Wordsworth, W.S. Graham, Wallace Stevens, Jack Spicer, Fanny Howe, and others. She links this German Romantic unpacking of the brain on its way among phenomena to the mysteries of the acoustic surface of poems using Jan Mukařovský's 1940 'The Sound Aspect of Poetic Language', where he states that the poem's sound system can 'reveal hidden possibilities or semantic relations between words' (qu. p. 65). Riley finds this 'enormously encouraging' because 'it puts its critical finger on what you'll intuit in practice: that a poem's implications can unfold in and through its sound-echoes' (65). We are invited to test this out on one of Riley's own poems, the 2014 prose poem 'Boxy Piece', which is quoted in the final talk, 'On "the voice of the poem"'. The poem conjures a columbarium made up of 'small boxes' housing their thought and the 'chirring' un-dead:

Satin-lined frames stack square in blocks nested to a columbarium – then mumble closet doves, whose fond carpenter drills piercings for more air, won't let you flap. (108-110).

The prose rhymes of 'columbarium' and 'mumble', 'blocks' with 'boxes', 'square'-'columbarium'-'air', the f-string and s/z-string, the run on 'c' as k-phoneme and letter, the persistent 3-beat: these indicate that sonic language is the carpenter. They also, through their very heady insistences and close array, give a sinister edge to the carpenter's piercings and control: language's care and power relies on a monotonizing of the music the doves can make, a coffining of their potential exuberance, hearable in the phono-semantic collocation of the columbarium with the doves' mumbling, their brooding stifled in the packed space and time of the dovecot, so that they can better mimic the chirring of the undead. Equally, the poem houses the doves as living thoughts and quasi-livelinesses, a makeshift house that Language built: the lyric, Riley tells us, muses 'about how an inner liveliness of words can cohere with the captivatingly solid fact of the poem-object' (110). The columbarium, according to this allegorical scheme, is the poem as object; the doves the lively words of the poem; and the carpenter is language, constructing the house for the doves to live and brood within, drilling the structure of the poem to allow the air from outside the poem into the air-as-poem, enabling the captivatingly solid poem to sing and breathe. The edgy wit that concedes the control-freakery of the carpenter is also aware of the other kind of columbarium calqued on the dovecot: the wall of niches housing cremation urns. The reminder uncovers the unsettling question as to why the dovecot: a structure designed to maintain a potential source of meat for a hungry big house. The violence of this is also true to the ways we are captivated by poems so objective:

The thing, thickset all through, can meet with an onlooker's restless longing for its permeability – even with an impulse to punch holes in it, as if to fashion a colander. [...] The object, properly stuffed with itself, would halt only at its own edges. (110

The carpenter with their drill playacts the pent-up violent longing of the poem's reader, dreaming a halt to the 'thorough-going denseness' of the poem-as-object, and to the deadened liveliness of the words and creatures in it; through abreaction punching holes in the stifling environment made by language-as-maker, and mimicking the violence of the piercing drill.

         There is so much going on in these essays, the head spins: so much to learn and to take in, so bewilderingly febrile and supersubtle as they are, so refreshingly advocative of an exuberant innerness that preserves secrecy and privacy, allowing in more quiet air to breathe within the solidity of the poem as 'secreted life' and transpersonal voice.

         Denise Riley's distaste for the promotional star system running poetry events and competitions is based on critique of a very real and corrupting translation of the strange anonymity of writing into personal style and talent, a carny apotheosis of the poet-self as celebrity. It also speaks to a resistant and strategic shyness that is performed as a counter-theatrical acting out of that anonymity. As Simone de Beauvoir argued, 'she does not present herself to observation; she is, like the picture or the statue, or the actor on the stage, an agent through whom is suggested someone not there – that is, the character she represents, but is not.'[1] Except in this case it is not character she is representing but language being channelled. The anonymity being defended and performed presents inevitably as theatrical too, but as an acting out of what Erving Goffman defines as 'backstage language' (78),[2] a self-abnegating informality that gives language not the actor-poet Mallarméan top billing.

         Peter Riley would agree with most of Denise Riley's surmises about the voice of the poem: 'The poet is anonymous,' he wrote in his 1992 essay, 'The Creative Moment of the Poem', 'and poetic language comes from an unknown source. This is not the same thing as saying language is without individuality and the poem a cypher, but it does mean that the text is all you have' (46). The essay is collected in About Poetry, edited by Kelvin Corcoran, collecting interviews and essays from 1983 to 2022. The text being the case has the effect, Riley argues, of making the reader anonymous too for the poet composing, 'an unknown extent to which the writing is directed [...] poetry gains a lot of its energy from the tension between the person who in fact writes it and the non-person it evidently comes from' (46). Language coming from an unknown source directed towards an unknown receiver by a poet as non-person: the effect of that is a releasing of multiplicities, again chiming with Denise Riley: '[Poetry' brings a plurality of event and condition, a crossing of pasts and present, through to a truth which both has and is a central point and requires no other guarantor than itself' (47). Poetry as art-object is what David Nowell-Smith in his book on W.S. Graham has defined as 'a relational complex', holding in relation different media, gazes, prosodic figures, voicings, identities, strategies of address, that is also a temporal complex of differently timezoned events and motifs.[3] In Peter Riley's terms: 'the presence of the poem is not held to a singular past, but operates precisely where a plurality of pasts and presents intersect, personal and impersonal, actual and fictional' (47).

         Many of the arguments in the essays and interviews turn on his wide-ranging defence of the songlike lyric, against the hostility to it as bankrupt I-voice apolitical musing. In a brief piece on quotations in poetry, Riley reflects on his own practice of collage (in Excavations, for instance) and the ways indirect allusion and overt citation might be less entangled than one might assume with the ideological complex of the originals drawn upon or quoted. He turns to Denise Riley's practice, to her notes to her poems in the 2000 Reality Street Selected, where she faces down a reader, who might think her free quoting of pop lyrics makes her work read as derivative, with a wry 'I sound derivative? Because I am, I'm Echo, your reporter', going on to suggest 'Echo might be a figure or a trope for the troubled nature of lyric poetry, driven by rhyme, condemned to repetition of the cadences and sound-associations of others' utterances'.[4] Peter Riley acknowledges the political problem, but also notes Denise Riley's resistance to it through her claim to 'a personal right to song', the quotations from discursive sources both signalling how 'double edged' 'the little song' is, but also 'the power, delight, or assent to common fate, which lyric fragments bring to her poems' (88). This is characteristically even-handed, and chimes with the many statements throughout this volume that understand the political predicament and collusions of poetry in our time while seeking always to bring out the lyric's countering of the darkness through its pastoral, local, ancient and fructifying connections to the commons, to the common people, to the loving bonds in language of the heart. It informs his travel poetics, from the emphasis on local culture in Alstonefield to the travel sketches in the Dance at Mociu. In the 2012 Daniel Eltringham interview gathered here, Riley states clearly how he is drawn to these 'elsewheres' not for their charm or apparent time-warp but because such and such a Carpathian village achieves 'the operations of a cohesive local society, all the interlocking functions, and how care is built into the inherited structure' (122). Those interlocking features of the structure rhyme with the interlocking prosodic features of poetry, as the 1987 close reading commentary of his poem 'Ospita', published here for the first time, spectacularly demonstrates. In it he reflects, for instance, on one undercurrent to the poem which is the play on diphthongs that turn on and around the key term 'voice'. This section of the commentary zooms in on these lines of the poem:

The music coils within; a long solo,
And the final voice squeezed from a lump
Of flesh held over a sink said and we tried
Our best to stifle that singing, ‘Do
What you will to ease me over the hump
Of death I belong to the great outside.'[5]

Denise Riley's sensitivity to the acoustic surfaces as portals chimes with Peter Riley's commentary, as his exposition tracks the relations between voice, fruit and light as poem-motifs. 'Let me not omit to note', he states somewhat sardonically:

that sink becomes singing because its middle consonant is voiced, and that is now a fruiting and an enlightening. And the pain of lessness, the most spreading force we know. The whole sonnet is clasped pain at start and end, but what starts as a physical pain goes through the voice tunnel and emerges as a mental pain, dispersed. (36-7)

This is guardedly baffling, but could be intuited as Riley's self-satirical blush and pain in confessing the weird othernesses of composition and their relation to physical and mental pain. The diphthong in 'voice' generates somehow the diphthong chime in the 'tried'-'outside' rhyme, but also through an even more obscure relation the sound-repetition connecting 'sink' and 'singing' (via the voice in voiced). You need a northern accent to say 'singing' with a 'g', so the strange voice that is the third articulating energy in the poem is as other as language itself; but local and embodied as a northern music of words are within Peter Riley's insides. The music coils within and is squeezed from the body by the pain; but it sings that it comes emerged and dispersed in the great outside, a beautiful and witty demonstration of Denise Riley's Clark lecture argument. The clunky rhymes of the poem (particularly 'lump' and 'hump') are satirical of any Keatsian pretension (acknowledged by Keats himself with his 'sod'-'clod rhyme in his most famous ode); yet at the same time the poem holds to the power of lyric to field a fusion of pain within and dispersal of voice into the great outside – in the bilocational interlocking of interiority and environment of voice as unknown source, ambiguous utterance and textual recurrence. The essays and interviews that Kelvin Corcoran has brought together (including three interviews of his own with Peter Riley, 1983, and two in 2016) are a great testament to his fructifying, enlightening and radical championing of lyric at a time of great lessening and terminal threat.

         Bernadette Mayer's 2001 talk at the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, is out as a pamphlet through the good offices of Distance No Object, entitled The Vancouver Transcript. She takes her audience (made up largely of fellow poets) through all her published work from Story through to Studying Hunger Journals, and what is striking in the off the cuff remarks is how passionately critical it is for her to weave her own work into the voices of others.  This seems to have blossomed as a technique out of her own practice with her own texts: Story began as a story about falling down into which she incorporated 14 other stories, opening and ending with a sentence from that origin-text ('[s]o it had a sort of diamond-shaped shape to it' [3]). Moving began as an arbitrary pile of papers on her desk which Anne Waldman published by letterpress, Mayer insisting that 'the right hand margin be jagged and it drove the printer crazy' (3). It was based on a children's book and contained quotes from it, because children's books 'answer questions that adult books just get too complicated to even deal with' (4). This combination of intra- and intertextuality found new form with the 1971 Memory, which dwelt on the random dailiness of experience with 36 photographs and a journal maintained over a month interval, and it got shown in Soho gallery in Vancouver as a four foot square print of the shots accompanied by an eight hour recording of the narration. The pictures were of 'just everyday things. Whatever was in front of me. I mean, I didn't want them to be special pictures' (6). The receiving of phenomena can be textual or experiential, an inwarding of texts from without that is then itself dispersed into the great outside as show. The 1978 Midwinter Day concentrates on one day's experiencings, and was supplemented by newspaper clippings of the December 22nd 1978 day as well as a roll of film, tape recordings and dream diary:

What I did Midwinter Day later is, you know, rewrite it basically, fill in the newspaper articles. I got a list of the bestsellers that were on the shelves of the local bookstore in Lennox. I accumulated a list of all the poets who were mothers, and then poets would call me up and say "Oh my god! You didn't include me in this list!" [laughs].

The plurality of the poem as art-object is a modernist concatenation of information, dreamwork and perception accompanied by gendered and aesthetic communitarian bonding connections and associations. Mayer importantly holds it as an article of faith to incorporate the words of others into her poems, to demonstrate the collaged nature of the voices that knock at the door within the open and improvisatory zones within the compositional timeframe. It's a treat to have this charming talk in print, opening the backstage door to the language processes at work behind the scenes.

         From the same press, Sara Nicholson's pamphlet, Honesty, opens with  a Riley-like meditation on pain, 'What Ails Me'. The title is explicated in the first line: 'The ache, the depth, motion and all things / that change'. There's a turn on the self ('am I / Being too broad here') then the list of ailments continues: 'the horizon/ and the myth / Of infinite regression, of gravity (which was once / called music) / And passion'. The poem goes on, citing grand and tiny illusions, 'the indifference of strangers / to the flight / Of birds' as further items that ail, before again incorporating the skeptical reader; 'can you hear me now, do you want me / to be more specific // About outer space', then rolls on with quantum particles, the intersecting of two bodies, tasks and efforts, a narrative, 'a geometric center, the appalling // beauty of the abstract'. What holds these items in the list together as painful is not quite clearly knowable, which is partly the point. The cosmic physics of change in the universe happens at infinitely small and impossibly great scales, and the poem takes on more and more of a Pascalian dread as the poet more and more fears the heckling of readers keen for technical accuracy and detailed specific knowledge. This fear of the reader hunting down amateurishness melds with a cognate anxiety about the indifference of strangers to the mysterious powers of the world out there. The twin fears split the voice as self in two ('am I / Being'), and threatens the poem itself as harbouring of image and phenomena. The phrase 'of gravity (which was once called music) / And passion' (which may point back to myth, ie the myth of gravity and passion) is laid out like this on the page, and continues with an image stretched across the stanza break:

                                                of gravity (which was once

            called music)

And passion, like flowers in an electro-

            magnetic field

Which ripple and spark (1)

The stanzaic form repeats as a seven-line unit with three lines that are themselves snapped in two with indents for the second half, and this snapping crosses the stanza break as the pairs run down the page. The indents and breaks are part of the formal pattern then, not an improvised movement. The lines therefore sit on the page as 'flowers' (as lyric following the Greek anthology tradition) within an open field (as in the Olsonian tradition) that is not quite as open as it seems, so like the electromagnetic field subject to laws and orders that are scientifically abstract and enforcing. The voice that emerges is shaped by the laws of the form just as the self that speaks, as in the me of the title, is engulfed within the unfurling powers and mystery of 'all things'; such that the identity of the self is not only questioned but given over to the rippling, sparkling energies of phenomena. The poet’s knowledge, for instance that before Newton discovered gravity, the universe was thought to be held together by the music of the spheres, or that Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity led to Faraday’s experiments with induction in 1831, is bungled by the interrupting poeticism of gravity and passion as flowers, revealing a cringeworthy dabbler’s thin veneer.

The two bodies that intersect in this poem might in trad lyric be the I/Thou of the love poem: here they speak to the ways the bodies we have, their passions and aches, are intersected through quantum forces with the heavenly bodies so very far out there, such that the ordinary poet-reader contract is broken, poem/poet can no longer be sure they can be heard across the page divide, broken as the voice is into and by the potencies of outer space:

                                    the appalling

            beauty of the abstract

Can you hear me, should I trace from X to Y

            a downward

Slope, the ache & depth, can I parse the grammar

            of agony, the wheel

And pulley, the wedge, all our inventions: maps,

            poetry, drones. (1)

This is how the poem ends, with an intimation, almost beyond control and logic, of the double divide between poem and reader and between inhuman technicity within the science of the universe and the slope of the emotional, painful poem on its way down the page. There is a fragmentary image of torture at the heart of the stanza, and the wedge stands out as a density of abstract otherness, close to Virginia Woolf's 'wedge-shaped core of darkness' from To the Lighthouse, but with a post-human sense here, as something that radically separates, one of the inventions that need parsing alongside the three final items of the list, 'maps / poetry, drones', an Elizabeth Bishop-like collocation leading not to triumphant celebration of creative power but to the military targeting and killing machine of the contemporary world. The I and me emerge again as only questionably there in the abstract language machine of X and Y, and the poet fears her own ability to analyse and understand the language of her own poem. The poem is 'ours' not hers, and the multiple sources of her anxiety, all the things that change, find another more oblique source in anxiety about the things that kill. The poem is and is not Nicholson's: it leans heavily on Shakespeare (particularly sonnets 93, 94, 107, 'I cannot know thy change'), on quantum textbooks dwelling on the implausible impossibilities of the science ('the quantum particles / that swerve / Along the vertex'), on doubts drawn from postmortem poets of the no man's land between poem and reader such as Whitman, Dickinson, W.S. Graham. As with both Rileys, Nicholson grounds her own innermost feelings, her aches and depths, in a public external zone as great as the universe itself, as a means towards both confessing the otherness and outerness of poetry's origins and modes of transmission and dreaming of a potential return to a post-posthuman lyric of feeling, common bond and countercultural resistance.

[1] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex , trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 533.

[2] Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1956), p. 78.

[3] David Nowell-Smith, W.S. Graham: The Poem as Art Object (Oxford: OUP, 2022), p. 234.

[4] Quoted in Peter Riley, 'Quotation: ''It Don't Mean a Thing''', About Poetry, 86-93 (p. 88).

[5] 'Ospita, Wirksworth to Cambridge , 1983-1987 ', Poeticanet.

Adam Piette teaches as the University of Sheffield and co-edits Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett; Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945; The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. His collection CCCLXV is out with Crater Press, and Lies Blurring Here with Broken Sleep.

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