I'm Adely Mone and this is This Low Down.

Have you ever heard poets talk about voice or use the phrase, I just need to find my voice

or something like that?

It's a concept that's talked a lot about in graduate programs and in craft seminars.

Although I've heard about it throughout my life as a poet, I still sometimes wonder

what it means.

For me, the voice of a poem is the voice underneath whatever this speaker is saying.

The place that is both the writer and not the writer.

That's the only way I can describe it because that's how it happens to me.

And I am really writing, really working on poems, which is often as alive as I ever feel,

as present as I ever feel, I am not just speaking to the world, I am listening to it, listening

to my body, my blood, my ever-changing pulse that slows and quickens depending on the

emotionality of the subject.

Since I was working so intensely on a poem that I forgot to eat, I got up and made

myself something to eat quickly, something like a piece of toast with peanut butter on

it, something for sustenance and not necessarily pleasure.

And when I returned to my office, I couldn't remember what I was listening to.

I looked at my phone and tried to figure out if I had been listening to the radio or a

podcast.

I checked my computer to see what windows were open and where the sound had been coming

from before I broke for lunch.

It was then that I realized the voice I had been hearing, the thing that I could swear

...