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Finding the Voice

© Billy Marshall Stoneking

Poetry never really made sense to me until I heard it read out loud by my 11th grade English teacher. Ten years later, the importance of aurality was brought back to me once again when, as an English teacher myself, I was presented with the challenge of igniting some sort of poetic flame in the hearts and ears of a group of Year 12 students whose predominant interests were sex and beer. As it turned out, I chanced upon an LP recording entitled, Tough Poems for Tough People, which proved a god-send, not only for an inexperienced teacher, but for his students who up till then hadn't realized poetry could be that good. The poems on the record were not only well chosen but incredibly well read by the likes of Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis and another man whose name I no longer recall. Poetry was suddenly and almost magically relevant without being scatological. At about the same time, I started writing poetry myself. Bad poetry, mostly, though at the time I didn't realize just how bad.

Finding one's voice sounds a rather simple-minded occupation. I'm sure there are some who'll say, "I never lost it to begin with!" and if that's the way you feel then there's no need to read any further. As for me, I realized very early that when I wrote poems I usually ended up sounding like somebody else. There was a curious difference between my speaking voice and the voice I was trying to get down on paper. Thus began an odyssey of discovery that took up the better part of fifteen years.

In striving to be "literary", the fledging poet very often writes the poem he/she hears someone else saying. Or writing down the poem he/she imagines someone else might write. The amateur literary world is strewn with bad imitators of Ginsburg, Plath, and others whose names can go unmentioned. Not that there's anything wrong with imitating the poets you love. Making experiments using the voices of others is a great way of learning how the language works (and plays), and can be of great benefit so long as you don't get stuck there.

The surest way to finding one's own voice is by using it. And becoming conscious of how it behaves. It also has a lot to do with having something worth saying to begin with, something one feels so deeply, there's no need to dress it up as something more than what it is. In this way one strives to be simple. The best poems almost always are.

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