Creating a Voice in Poetry :: Reports Poetry Poems Literature Essays

Creating a Voice in Poetry Discuss how the poets create voices in their work. Write about Reports and one other poem. The poem 'Reports' focuses on one teachers cynical approach on writing school reports. This didactic poem take full advantage of using the imperative and pragmatics, as well as manipulating graphological features, such as the use of italics to indicate quotations. The poem is also written as a monologue, showing one side of a conversation, allowing the reader to focus on the opinions and character of an individual... in this case the school teacher. Similarly, this method is used in Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Head of English', taken from 'Standing Female Nude.' The poem 'Head of English' makes good use of written language, creating the tone of a pompous school teacher but also uses punctuation to give the reader an idea about the character portrayed. 'Head of English' shows one characters disdain for another, however the reader is only meant to visualise the seemingly over confident Head of English. Duffy uses a monologue style to allow the reader to engage with the teacher in question and allows the reader to empathise (although not sympathise) with the voice in the poem. The poem opens with the line; "Today we have a poet in the class." On a surface read through this opening line could be intended to enthuse the pupils, however in my opinion this remark shows subtle hints of sarcasm, however unintentional or subconscious these may be. Grammatically the sentence structure suggests that the teacher is to the point, there is no indication of a break between "Today" and "we" although, the reader would expect a teacher to be taking her time and would at least expect to see a comma. As well as this the full stop at the end of the line adds emphasis to the sentence and brings it to an abrupt end, almost definitely a purposeful move on the part of the poet, to suggest to the reader that the character in the poem is abrupt. The hints of sarcasm are then backed up between lines three and five, when the teacher says; " Perhaps we're going to witness verse hot from the press. Who knows." The first sentence suggests that the teacher is testing the poet. On the surface it seems as if she is trying to enthuse the pupils, although the pragmatics suggest that she is testing the poet, almost challenging the poet. Then the second sentence, "Who knows.", backs up the readers thoughts of the teacher. Intriguingly the poet has manipulated the language again by using a full stop to end a sentence that would normally be a question.