Among other things, I have been reading Jane Hirshfield’s book about writing poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Here’s a long quote that I think is worth thinking about, not just from the poetry angle, but from the position of being a teacher who is trying to write his own poem through his teaching. This section discusses voice, one of the Nine Gates through which poetry enters the reader’s heart and mind. I’d argue that good teaching is like writing a poem; I imagined a classroom when I read this passage.

Voice is not a matter of subject, or of activity a poem undertakes; it is another level of content, equally essential  to a poem’s realization, infusing each choice and gesture a poem makes. Voice is the underlying style of being that creates a poem’s rounding presence, making it continuous, idiosyncratic, and recognizable.

A person’s heard voice is replete with information. So it is with the voice of a poem, directing us in myriad ways into the realm it inhabits — a realm more or less formal, more or less argumentative, more or less emotional, linear, textured. As we gauge a person’s kindness by tone, regardless of what she is saying, we similarly recognize a poem’s tenderness or harshness to the world around it; its engagement or detachment; whether it is ironic, comic, fantastic, serious, compassionate, irreverent, or philosophical. We intuit these things as a dog intuits another dog’s friendly or challenging disposition.

Voice in this sense is the body language of a poem — the part that cannot help but reveal what it is. Everything that has gone into making us who we are is held there. Yet we also speak of writers “finding their voice.” The phrase is both meaningful and odd, a perennial puzzle: how can we “find” what we already use? The answer lies, paradoxically, in the quality of listening that accompanies self-aware speech: singers, to stay in tune, must not only hear the orchestral music they sing with, but also themselves. Similarly, writers who have “found a voice” are those whose ears turn at once inward and outward, both toward their own nature, thought patterns and rhythms, and toward those of the culture at large.

If “finding a voice,” one that helps to create a learning environment, requires ears that listen both inward and outward, then how can we see teaching as anything but an artful creation, one that creates a relationship and transforms a relationship simultaneously? How do we build the capacity of teachers to “find their voices?” Maybe one way is to look away from corporate, mechanistic models, and toward models like Hirshfield’s. For me, that means my “poem” includes thinking about the “voice” I create for myself, and through which I speak in my classroom.