Ellen West by Frank Bidart   In an interview with Mark Halliday that accompanies his selected poems, In the Western Night, Bidart speaks of “how to fasten to the page the voice and the movements of the voice in my head.” I love Bidart’s insistence on voice’s artifice. As a poet who has always been troubled by the representation of voice as a “natural” or expressive category, I find Bidart’s take on voice liberating. Here, voice is not an unmediated outpouring of feeling but rather a careful construct, which has to be attached–stapled? bolted? I like to imagine four-pronged gold fasteners—to a page. It is through this image of the “fastened” voice that I would like to read Bidart’s poetic turns in “Ellen West.”…