Third Voice
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, Immanuel 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.
Bio
Ruth Ellen Kocher earned an MFA in creative writing (1994) and a PhD in English (1999) at Arizona State University.
Praise for this book
Kocher conjures a cast of nine speakers who ‘perform’ a series of prose poems. The 19th-century minstrel show provides the venue for these characters, whose language and subject matter contrast with ‘sampled’ language Kocher appropriates from philosophy texts and minstrel manuals. Into this history, through prose poems, Kocher brings African American civil rights martyrs (Martin Luther King Jr., Emmett Till, Malcolm X), performing artists (Pearl Bailey, Eartha Kitt, Richard Pryor, Sun Ra), and cultural icons (W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Paul Robeson).
Robin Becker The Georgia Review
Kocher takes a cue from T.S. Eliot’s essay 'The Three Voices of Poetry' as she utilizes the third voice to thread history and the present. Kocher uses these voices as a means of challenging racism and exposing its changing reflection. There’s a lot to process in this collection, but the language is rich, deep, lyrical, and engaging enough to support the reader through the complexity of the presentation. The dramatic voices that operate throughout act as a reminder that history is a fragmented reality with many angles, not simply a linear series of indisputable facts.
Publishers Weekly
