Third Voice: Poems

by Ruth Ellen Kocher

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Praising the power of lyric drama, T. S. Eliot described the use of third voice as a means for characters to address and interrogate one another, and second voice as a way for characters to talk to the audience. In this daring new book, the principal narrator presents as a caricature reflecting the tangible experiences of a disembodied "I" posed against absurd selfhood a voice imbued by sublime otherness. Within a dismantled minstrel show, Ruth Ellen Kocher frames a female voice splintered and re-figured as "self" and "character." The incomprehensible nature of the sublime emerges through a cast of other personages including Eartha Kitt, Geordi LaForge, Emmanuel Kant, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X. THIRD VOICE asserts lyric beyond personal expression and drama beyond the stage, using the spectacle of minstrelsy as a deformation of mastery in an audaciously conceptual yet visceral performance."

Genres: Poetry

114 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2016

Reviews

[J Macarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Celebrating Black History (Month, 2022) & Black Literature ... by reading THIRD VOICE (Tupelo Press, 2016) by Ruth Ellen Kocher.

Drawing from T. S. Eliot's "The Three Voices of Poetry," Ruth Ellen Kocher delivers a "third-voice" theatrical drama in prose poem form with a cast of characters that includes Pearl Bailey, Eartha Kitt, Sun Ra, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, among others who center Lacy Neva Igga, an American Studies professor who expresses the trappings of performance and expectations. What unfolds onstage is an interrogation of Modernism (Eliot, Stein) and a celebration of the indelible, invaluable contributions Black artists and thinkers and Black culture have made to literary culture, all the while parodying the “song and dance” of traditions, master, and mastery. Of “Boogie Woogie” lyric and dramatic power! From a “heart [that] throbs begonias” and chooses between

“A. The Sublime
B. Terror
C. All of the above”

Ruth Ellen Kocher’s THIRD VOICE is an “All of the above” and “[Boogie Oogie Woogie]” book!

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

among its much -- meditations on blackness & the sublime & "skits" w/Sun Ra, Geordi Laforge, Lieutenant Uhuru & Malcom X -- funny, heartbreaking, philosophically questing

[Sarkis Antonyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

lands with its feet on the ground, poetry poetry

[Emily Pérez · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is at once a deeply intellectual and visceral look at minstrelsy. Loved the structure of this book. It is one I will have to read again--