My spicy take on "poet voice" is that it's just the audible equivalent to the visual signifier of keeping line breaks in poetry that doesn't have metrical lines any more
If you complain about song-song intonation and exaggerated pauses in readings of prose poems but are fine with arbitrary line breaks in prose poems in print you are INCONSISTENT
The question, if you reasonably prefer not to learn meter, is not "why do we do poet voice?" still less "how can we avoid it?" it is "how can poet voice be WEAPONISED?"
Feb 2, 2026 16:13"if the fool would persist in his folly..."
If you do poet voice hard enough my guess is you will probably invent doggrel which, as Byron and Marvell and Skelton will tell you, is actually one of the noblest forms verse can take
