He do the police in different voices

“He do the police in different voices” That’s how the orphan Sloppy reads the paper to his foster mother in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and that’s what Eliot titled The Wasteland before Pound crossed it out. Have you often resisted the injunction to “find your voice”? Thought that it’s our own unique mission, our racket, our sensitivity as poets, to be able (and allowed) to shift, voice to voice, register to register, sometimes within a single line? Here are polyvocal poems, poems from different tenors, with addressors/addressees that change between the beginning and the end; and works that go from bathos to desperation, science to prayer, strophe to declaration. Because what’s the use of a simple leap? Like the great drag queen Dorian Corey said: “If you shoot an arrow, and it goes real high… Hooray for you.”