The Art of Finding One’s Voice as A Poet

By Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan

Finding one’s voice as a budding poet is one of the daunting tasks that accompany the journey of poetry writing, and this is because there is no specific metric, or yardstick with which one’s voice as a writer is judged. The voice of a poet, although abstract, is one of the most vital elements that distinguishes and impacts the uniqueness of one’s poetry, thus, its importance. Defining “voice in poetry” is a difficult task for me, and I believe it is generally a cumbersome venture distinguishing between the voice and style of a poet. Both the voice and the style of a poet are intangible features that are borne out of several elements which come together to make the pieces. Hence, the sum of all the effects a poet employs to deliver a poem could be termed as a voice, or style of such a poet. Word choice, tone, use of punctuation and grammar, rhythm, choice of subject matter, point of view, use of imagery, poetic techniques, line breaks, use of meters, length of lines, and so on, can all be summed up into what we regard as the voice or style of a poet. The big question is: how does one as a budding poet cultivate/find their unique voice?

According to Billy Collins, “What I don’t like about the expression ‘finding your voice’ is that it’s very mystifying in the minds of young people. It makes you feel — made me feel when I first heard it — that your voice is tied up with your authenticity, that your voice lies deep within you, at some root bottom of your soul, and that to find your voice you need to fall into deep introspection… you have to gaze deeply into yourself. The frustration and the anxiety is that maybe you won’t find anything there. That you’re on this terrible quest to nowhere.” 
A truth about finding one’s voice as a poet is that it is a habit that is cultivated over time, knowingly or unknowingly. You do this via reading wide and practicing consistently. Your poetic voice is a feature that grows into you from the level of the literary environment you build around yourself. It is not something that can grow from your inside without an external push, cultivation, and adequate grooming. Thus, your voice as a poet grows from the level of the poetry you consume as a reader, and thereafter, ignites what’s inside of you as a creative mind, spurring you to create a unique blend of all the works you consume from all the writers you admire.

To truly cultivate one’s voice as a poet, one must consume a variety of works from other poets, and in doing this, you are not necessarily searching for your own voice from the works of these other writers. You are, however, discovering the writers whose works ignite jealousy in you. This jealousy is a necessary fuel that nudges you into recreating beauty in your own way. There are poems we read and wish we were the writers of because of their magnificence. This urge often spurs us into attempting to recreate such beauty in our own way. If we consistently employ this approach of admiring and attempting to recreate, it will come a time when our writings will have a blend of elements absorbed from reading the other poets whose work we admire. This unique blend sums up into what is referred as the poet’s voice, or his style of delivery.

In a nutshell, the art of cultivating one’s voice as a poet lies in the poet’s ability to read voraciously and consume the works of other poets whom they adore. Thereafter, the art of imitating originally comes into play until the poet, gets to where he is experienced enough to understand that the only person to truly imitate is their own self. At this point, they must have already absorbed a gigantic volume of all the beauties from the works of other poets they cherish, thus, making up a spectrum of it as their unique voice and style of delivery.