The first cassette recorder I ever bought was the first adult machine I’d ever owned and it felt so thrilling it made me nervous. I immediately did two things with my recorder: At once, I began collecting theme songs to tv shows and sit-coms I watched (Not that anyone cared ) and second, I snuck the machine out of the house to the alley between ours and the neighbor’s house and recorded my voice to know what I really sounded like. I snuck it outside so no one would hear me. I sounded awful. Foreign. Nowhere near what I sounded like to myself. And certainly nowhere near as good or masculine or unique as the announcers I heard on tv everyday. I never recorded myself again and focused on TV clips and movie scenes and music.
It never occured to secretly record my family or the conversations from the kitchen between relatives or my mother’s clients getting their hair pressed weekends. Okay, I know now that’s illegal. But what would I not give– even if it was a criminal fine or sentence– to hear the voices of my parents and cousins again, to hear any of those lost stories?
This month I visited two different college classes to talk about both my poetry collections. In each class, I was complimented on and asked about my voice. About how I present my work. People have graciously asked me about my voice for years. The answer was long, engaging different elements from different interests in my life. I figured I would give a full answer someday.
When I stood in the wild grass and bushes next to my house, recording and rewinding a sample of my voice over and over, I couldn’t say then what I was listening for. What I wanted was the resonant vibrato I’d been hearing from voice over announcers on radio and tv: “Tonight at 8 on KBHK, TV 44”, “On the next episode of…”, “You’re listening to…” “Soft and warm, the quiet storm– “. My whiny grade school pitch, in comparison, was unbearably whiny and ineffective. After that first sample, I was no longer curious and decided not to record myself again.
But I recorded others, falling in love and fascination with Big, Important Voices on tv. When I was little, I wanted to be an actor and watched a ton of movies and tv shows. Actor Adolph Caesar owned my ear years before I ever saw what he looked like. He narrated what felt like hundreds of Blaxploitation trailers throughout the 70’s. He was my ghost uncle in the culture. I knew him immediately, but didn’t know who he was until he showed up barking at Denzel Washington in A Soldier’s Story (or arrogantly stomping through Mister’s front yard in The Color Purple)
I’m required here to acknowledge Don LaFontaine, the lead voice in this advertisement and every other movie trailer you remember. But there’s also the little credited and ubiquitous John Leader, Al Chalk, Mark Elliot, Hal Douglass and Nick Tate. All voices I’d grown up listening to in the background of my life whether I recognized them or cared or not. They all seemed to influence how I might speak. Even Ernie Anderson whose voice I knew better than my father’s even as I didn’t know what he looked like until I was an adult.
I wondered when or if my voice would mature into something like theirs, (come on, Puberty!) but truthfully it was not a long held fantasy. Neither was acting, truth told. If anything those voices made me aware of annunciation, the shape of words coming through one’s mouth. Like announcers on tv, I would make up audio copy and cup my hand over one ear like an old school headset. While playing with toys, I would make up narration as if I were making the greatest movie ever that everyone must see.
In college, I worked at Peralta Colleges Television while studying Media Production at Laney College. It was my favorite job, full stop. One of my tasks was recording breaks and announcements between programs (“Coming up next: Sew What’s New!”), a job I would have done for free, forever.
Only once did I attend a voice over audition in a studio in San Francisco. Some cattle call a poetry friend who worked in the business was aware of. I felt inadequate standing at the mic, reading their copy and then looking up at the folks across from me in the booth. I felt like I’d lost a round before the game ever started. As if my voice wore a t-shirt to a church benefit.
My grandfather was a preacher. Most Sundays in my childhood, my mother and I would go with him to churches throughout the Bay Area. Church didn’t always bore me. Truthfully, I liked some preachers and looked forward to hearing them. But it was a number of years after doing poetry in and around the bay area before I realized how my grandfather had influenced my voice, my presentation.
It was always extra special on days when my grandfather preached. I didn’t always understand the sin of being a ‘ditch digger’ but I remained faithful to my grandfather’s passionate words and subsequently soaked up a lot from watching and listening to him. I was too young to ask about his ‘writing sermons’, but I was aware of him speaking and teaching. I was aware of his knowledge and the power of his voice and its conviction. It wouldn’t occur to me for years that he was my biggest influence as a writer and performer. What I was doing as a poet wasn’t far removed from what he did as a preacher. He restricted his focus on the word of God– I focused on Words and stories. What difference was it really– between him doing a sermon and afterwards four men in the congregation becoming pastors and leading their own churches, and me doing poems in a room of chatty and distracted people who gradually turn their attention to me, my voice somehow shutting down random chatter as it flared through the room.
Whatever it is, its a huge blessing that I’m grateful for and often take for granted. I was surprised over people complimenting me or reminding me of my voice. Its an invisible instrument I depend upon and take for granted. As with those voice over announcers, I find certain words and phrases to feel pleasant and thrilling on my tongue. For a while during the popularity of poetry slam, as competitors sped through their verses racing with the clock to get a 5 minute poem into a 3 minute time allotment, I often wondered if those poets ever ‘liked’ the words they were saying. Did the words have any meaning for them, or was it the clever phrases and pop culture references that tickled them the most? For me and the parade of voices before me, there always seemed something more important at stake: for the voice actors, it was: Commerce! See this movie! Run don’t Walk! For my grandfather it was: Your Very Soul! Pray and Repent Before Its Too Late!
As a poet, there’s passion and purpose behind the words. The same passion that made me sit and write in the first place should inflame the voice I use to share those same words.
Once I had to read in a crowded college room and needed to send my voice above every head to be heard at the back wall, only to feel really guilty as the elder I’m standing in front of dropped his head. He seemed close to putting his fingers in his ears.
Once I attended a reading an a dude with a professional, radio-experienced voice told the room with his resonate, announcers voice: “Bring me your poems!! I’ll read all your poetry!” We were amused by him, but few took him up on that offer.
Not every poet is an expert in sharing their own work. I’m often guilty of reading into my chest instead of into the mic, despite knowing better.
One of my favorite writers, not widely known, is Bruce Jackson. Bruce was one of the few black poets to regularly show up at a weekly reading in a bar in San Francisco. He was a sharper, more dynamic a poet than any of us were. He was also shy to the degree of being unapproachable.
But when he would get up to the mic, it was a kind of event.
He would sit at the bar listening– sipping beer and tying figures with copper wire and sign up early to share his throat grabbing poetry. Then, he would step on stage and the room would cease breathing.
He was an incredibly quiet reader, despite writing vibrant, narrative poems about addiction, abuse, living in the Hood. He would place his mouth on the microphone and read his work quiet and slow. Pouring out his lines like volcanic lava. He had a deeply resonate voice, but sounded terrified to release it. He sometimes read like he was holding his breath. He would whisper his work, forcing you as audience to lean in– and when you leaned in you heard poems that were like fresh crime scenes. He was not a great orator. He was not a preacher. He was not an ideal reader. But he was one of the greatest poets I’d ever heard, and the entire room held its breath while he spoke.
At the end of the day, its not about voice at all. Its about the truth and beauty that voice is beckoning you to behold.
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