When I was in grad school I'd meet my thesis advisor, Catherine, on Tuesday nights at a café on New York's Upper West Side. We'd sit together at a small table, where she'd have me read my fresh, newly written poems out loud.

It was an exercise to hear how the poems sounded, a way to help pinpoint any hiccups in the rhythm, line breaks and so on. (It also taught the regular café-goers that, yes, poets gather over black tea and read poems about death, just like you imagined.)

One particular night, I started reading a new poem — but I only got through two lines before Catherine stopped me.

"Don't read it like it's a poem," she said. "Read it like you're talking to me." In other words, read like a human.

Without realizing it, I had been talking in "poet voice" — that affected, lofty, even robotic voice many poets use when reading their work out loud. It can range from slightly dramatic to insufferably performative. It's got so much forced inflection and unnecessary pausing that the musicality disappears into academic lilting. It's rampant in the poetry community, like a virus.

Ironically, the community itself pushes back against poet voice. Various op-eds have urged everyone to drop the act. It can reflect poorly on poetry itself, perpetuating the myth that poems are unattainable high art — elitist, even.

It's like that friend who visited London a couple of times and magically brought back a British accent.

"Dude. You're from Brooklyn."

Often, it's unintentional. Is there some subconscious reason poets are prone to the contrived "poet voice"? The answer may just lie in linguistics.

"I think it frames it as poetry," says Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You Just Don't Understand. In linguistics, "framing" signals what you think you're doing when you say something — your relationship to the words and to the people you're saying them to.

We might read poems this way simply because other poets do — we learn indirectly that this what a poem should sound like. Contemporary poetry, Tannen explains, can be quite conversational, so poets might use "poet voice" and intonation to frame what they're reading as poetry.

"You want to sound like your peer group, and you want to sound like a person you identify with should sound," Tannen says.

That poses a social dilemma, however. Poets span race, gender, class, sexuality — there's no singular brand of poet to identify with. The poet Lisa Marie Basile brings this fascinating discussion to the table in a Huffington Post op-ed from last September.

"Poet Voice, if nothing else, is simply a regurgitation of someone else's massive failings," Basile writes. "It appealed to the literate masses (as socio-cultural trends do) and it crept up into our classrooms and bookstores and communities, like texts, ideas and expectations of white male power. It is not questioned often enough. It should be questioned with exigency."

In many ways, "poet voice" then becomes a class issue — the pretentious becomes holier-than-thou, and therefore misguidedly empowering. "It says, 'I am not for you. I am a performance. I am better than,'" Basile argues.

In a video for the literary magazine SOUND, which comments on contemporary poetry writing and reading styles, Basile reads Marosa di Giorgio's "The History of Violets," once with "poet voice" and once without:

You can still hear a sort of affectation in Basile's voice in the second version, but it's less lofty, and more indicative of her own style. In her op-ed, she says the least poets can do is question why they use "poet voice." "Decide for yourself. Hear the inherent — not forced — music in poetry. Give yourself the option," she writes.

But when it's intentional, assuming a unique voice can also give the poet more agency, power or emphasis over his or her own words. Tannen talks about W.B. Yeats, whose recording of "The Lake Isle at Innisfree" at the British Library moved her to tears. He used bizarre intonation, elongating and wavering the end of each line.

"It gave everything extra meaning because it wasn't the intonation you expected. It makes you pay more attention to it in a more intense and special way," she says.

A more contemporary poet who assumes such a unique voice is Dorothea Lasky, who reads her work loudly and deliberately.

"I think when I read loudly, it is about my own power and intent," she said in a Bookslut interview. "I want my poems to be large animals — enormous, grotesque and beautiful animals — that you can’t help but notice ... I want the poems to be bigger and stronger than I could ever be."

Whether you enjoy "poet voice" or detest it is personal preference. But I agree with Basile that it's something poets should think about. I know I have been, ever since Catherine mentioned it that fateful Tuesday night.

Now that we know there could be a linguistic basis for the phenomenon, the question is, what can we do with that information?