by ROBERT FLEMING, Founding member of OLD SCRATCH PRESS – a poetry/short-form collective | estd. 2023

So confused. Isn’t a voice linked to speaking, singing, and screaming? What does a voice have to do with writing? What the fu** Robert?

A “writing voice” refers to the unique style and personality a writer expresses through their writing, which is a combination of their vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, and perspective, essentially how their individual personality comes across on the page. 

what is a writing voice – Google Search

For poetry, yours truly, defines a voice profile:

• Style: traditional, experimental, vs in between
• Themes (e.g. love, war)
• Forms (e.g., free verse, iambic pentameter)
• Devices (e.g. enjambment: 1 line continues onto next), metaphor, simile, rhyme)

CREATE A VOICE to INCREASE PUBLICATION SUCCESS

Most poetry magazine acceptance rates are about 2.4%. In order to increase your chance of publication acceptance success, create a writing voice and then target publications that have published work with your voice within the last two-years.

A writing acceptance rate is like a baseball player’s batting average (BA). Josh Gibson’s 1946 BA of 37.2% is the highest career Major League Baseball BA.

Josh Gibson

My poetry voice profile:

• Style: experimental
• Themes: masculinity, sexual orientation, sin/virtue, dystopia
• Forms: visual poetry, free-verse, Japanese Haiku/Mondo, sonnet, and pantoum
• Devices: sound (rhyme, alliteration, assonance), duality, homonyms, multiple-word-reversals, and end-titles

CREATING a WRITING VOICE

Oh NO Mr. Robert, an assignment is coming. Sir and madam, it is, I cannot lie.

A sleepless night, 3/14/1996, yours truly obsessed compulsed, to translate four of his favorite poets to a gay style: Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Berryman, and Dorothy Parker.

What I did for each poet:

• Select a favorite poem
• Analyze and document what the poem is (theme, form, devices) and why you like it
• Read the poem out loud
• Make an audio recording of your reading
• Handwrite the poem
• Type the poem
• Translate the poem to your style
• Place the original poem and translation side by side

What was the outcome impact of yours truly doing this exercise:

• In 1997, a follow-up creation of a visual poem that translates Dorothy Parker was included in art show in the District of Columbia

• Self-discovery that my style is experimental and an integration of one of the poets studied: Robert Frost and another poet: Dr. Seuss

More Voice Discovery guidelines: make diverse selections

• Select work written in different time eras: 50% 1,800 or earlier, 50% 1,900 and later
• Gender: 50% men, 50% woman
• Style (traditional vs experimental): at least 1 experimental

Discover your writing voice and use it!

Yours Truly is:

Robert Fleming, a contributing editor of Old Scratch Press

OLD SCRATCH PRESS – a poetry/short-form collective | estd. 2023

who published an Amazon best seller visual poetry book: White Noir

white noir: Fleming, Robert: 9781957224183: Amazon.com: Books

an editor of the digital magazine Instant Noodles

About – INSTANT NOODLES

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