A note from the poets

“The Voice and its Veils” is a constraint-based collaboration between Lucy Dawkins and Anthony Etherin. Beginning with the line “Let’s see what voice we find together”, subsequent lines are, alternately, perfect anagrams or homovocalisms of their preceding line. That is, line 2 is a perfect anagram of line 1, while line 3 takes the vowels of line 2 and, while retaining the vowels’ order, introduces new consonants. Similarly, line 4 is a perfect anagram of line 3, and line 5 is homovocalic with line 4. This pattern continues until the end of the poem. The anagrammatic lines (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) were largely written by Anthony, and the homovocalic lines (3,5,7,9) were largely written by Lucy. The poem thus looks at the generation of a new voice, via both collaborative and restrictive means, while questioning to whom, if anyone, this new voice belongs.

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Lucy Dawkins is a poetess and model with penchants for worldliness and wordiness. Her first book, ‘Stars are Falling’, will be published by Penteract Press in March 2020. She tweets @lucykdawkins.

Anthony Etherin is an experimental formalist poet, a publisher, and a musician. He tweets poetry @Anthony_Etherin and archives his published works online at anthonyetherin.wordpress.com. He lives in the United Kingdom, on the border of England and Wales.

Banner image by James Knight.