Tim Allen

The Voice Thrower Tim Allen

The Voice Thrower is from a batch of long poems begun in the 90s, arising in my "anti poetry" phase. The title should speak for itself, except it doesn't, which is the whole point of being a voice thrower. The poem had a twin, The Submissive Bastards, initially sharing the trope of a red sky at dusk, but TVT's sky turned into a horizon at sea, specifically from Portland looking west across Lyme Bay (Portlanders call it West Bay anyway). While The Voice Thrower's bastard twin became more controlled, TVT grew ever wilder until, while trying to round it off, I began to suspect the poem was an unconscious attempt to engage with the memory of my mother (Hannah Lawton), yet I resisted making this the focus and let the poem mutate again, the original trope of the red horizon (my mother had red hair) spreading rhizome-like through the various scenarios. The irony though was that the more it tried to resist biography the more autobiographical it became. -Tim Allen