Do I risk being lost in another poet's art?

I recently read Victoria Chang's blog, which essentially asked the question "What if reading lots of poetry is detrimental to your own voice?"

"And everywhere you go, you hear people say, “Read, Read, Read,” as their one piece of advice to aspiring writers. What if, just what if, all this advice is BS? What if, in fact, the best writers do what they feel, what comes naturally to them and erase all the outside noise? What if they do the exactly opposite of what’s popular or accepted or the norm?"

I am all for pushing art as far as it will go, or with ignoring convention. Or at least in trying to, in order to see where that gets us. Because let's face it. There is quite a bit of horrible abstract poetry out there. Enough to make an eskimo sell his green protractor.

But to me, a writer who doesn't read is like a dancer who doesn't listen to music. Is it possible to be passionate about what you do if a part of you isn't compelled to involve yourself on levels of your medium other than just creation?

Well. Yeah.

But I'm convinced that your art will suffer for it. That intangible suffering, like trying to imagine what your life would be like without your kid. You wouldn't miss them, because they wouldn't have existed. But you know, now, having had them, that there would be something missing afterall.

I also don't fully believe that someone, even trying their best to emulate another artist, can fully capture the other's spirit. There will be chinks in the writing. And these gaps, exposed by the inability to 'become' that first artist, expose a distinctly individual voice.

There are many books on the market that are written in the 'voice' of Jane Austen, for instance. But would she have written these books? (Sometimes I doubt the people writing these books want to have written them.) At some point, the word choice, the rhythm and even the direction of the book reveal themselves as something of the other artist. Because as viewers of art, we only see the very outermost layer of an anything; the final artistic product. We can never know why the artist made those decisions.

It is the reason that artists wishing to paint the human form study muscle and bone mass, and not merely the flatness presented in photographs. We can't emulate a writer. We can only distill some of the style of the works that they've chosen to give us.

And so, it becomes impossible, especially given the results, that any level of effort can knowingly result in the complete loss of your voice. I can't imagine being able to loose yourself in another writer's skin accidentally, by merely reading other poets' works. Influence is not the same as voice. My parents taught me to speak, but I only some like them in the loosest ways. And think of how much of my early life was actively spent trying to be exactly like them.

The article which Victoria Change cited for her blog says we must become the purple cow, some sort of anomaly, to make our mark in the world. But I think some of the problems with poetry today is that so many poets purposefully handle poetry as if it were some kind of ad campaign. We don't need a million poets being different. We need for a poet to push their words as far as they will go. Read some of Shakespeare's contemporaries. He didn't stand out because he was writing so differently from the others of his time. He stands out because he was writing so much better than those other writers.

For some of us, that means writing at the forefront of what is considered unique and novel. But for so many others, it's just writing things the way they were meant to be written, even if that style has been done to death. If that's the way you write, do it better.