I Think About How Voice is Embodied

David Whyte in A Heart Aroused says, “The voice emerges literally from the body as a representation of our inner world. It carries our experience from the past, our hopes and fears for the future, and the emotional resonance of the moment…Whether or not we tell the truth, the very act of speech is courageous because no matter what we say we are revealed” (120).

I think about how voice is embodied. It not only carries our mood, and how much energy we have, it carries our authority, and even welcome. I remembered how I could tell whether a journalist was going to talk to me back when I worked in publicity, just by how he picked up the phone. I could hear our relationship in his voice. Kenneth Woodward's  voice was one that kept me walking, aiming toward a tree at the end of the field because work was my life and I was spent. He kept me in the faith too. 

Whyte says, “Opera singers and performers quickly learn that sound is produced by the full length of the body. The lungs work in concert with the belly and the belly sits like a crossroads between the legs and the upper torso. The throat may be perfectly free but sit down to sing and you will produce a different, more curtailed sound than standing. Open the chest, round the belly with the whole breath, drop your center of gravity, and plant your feet on the floor, and you will sound grounded and solid, a world away from your voice when you are strutting tensely on tiptoe” (125 – 126).

I have felt that. When I stood in front of our county board, arguing for sanity with regards to planting renewables on the best farmland in the world, I found my name and my voice speaking a condensed three-minute argument. Our group of activists were able to influence the ordinances the county wrote until the state of Illinois took that right away. I have felt that when I recorded perspectives for WNIJ, our local NPR station. People have surprised me, when they walk up to me, saying they recognize my voice from the perspectives I post.

Whyte also says it’s hard to drop down into the belly because of childhood trauma. “As a child, a person may have disowned any feelings in their stomach area, for instance having had their joyous breathy sounds constantly curtailed by the adult rulers of their world…The result is that the voice lifts out of the belly and into the upper regions of the chest and throat, where it is more in grasp of the strategic mind and more amenable to being nice” (128- 129).

A dear friend who is an opera singer has spoken about the body work and emotional work she does with singers to help them find this place in their bellies and breath, so they can sing with power.

Disowning my belly, my voice, my breath certainly has been my story.

I don’t remember the things I told my mother, just the stuff of everyday life. Because I was a lonely child, growing up on a farm a mile in off the main road, I made her my best friend. I told her everything, except my tears. I saved those for the woods or the barn.

Often we spoke in the car. I’d tell her about a disagreement at school or how a rival in youth group, hurt my feelings.  “You talk too much. Stop chewing on it. You talk too much,”  she’d reply. When things were going well enough, she’d say, “This too would pass.” Then she’d throw in, “You’re special to suffer so much. God has a special call for your life.” My mother mentioned a classmate who never seemed to struggle saying, “She won’t have the depth you have with all your struggle.” Then she went back to: “People aren’t interested in all that detail. They don’t care.”

The classmates who never seemed to struggle, did have depth and worked out a good life, as did I. Neither one of us is any more special than the other. I learned she wasn’t interested in all that detail, but now I don’t blame her. If she was anything like me, I’m sure her mind was so full of her own pain and her own creativity, she wanted the solitude of the car and quiet. Who wants to listen to an unhappy child’s chatter, especially when there seems no end to the complaint or tears? Unhappy people, day in and day out, can pull you into your own pit.  

I became a poet so I could hide behind the lines and images. Though later I fell in love with how sentences can sing. The computer has made prose easier to manage. I found other people and places that silenced me because that’s what I knew. But I persisted. Gradually I overcame being afraid of my audience born of too many brutal writing workshops poking at my vision. I credit making Facebook posts like little poems with helping me find my voice.

I don’t know why I was called to be a poet when so much silencing came against me. Was it the powers of darkness resisting someone who had something so important to say, those blocks were important to lay down? Was it to strengthen me so I could learn to make peace with my voice, my own words, and the way I see things? Was it more about giving me hope when I sat on my horse longing because I had a craft that challenged me, that gave my life meaning—there was always another poem, always another story to write. Was it a gift to help me sort out my perceptions and maybe help me make peace with the secrets because I could make them up and perhaps those imaginations would lead me to the truth?

When I read out loud here or on WNIJ, you hear more than my words. You hear me breathing from my chest, and a raspy voice like I’m a smoker and I am not. Weariness and lack of sleep catch in my throat. My voice is like gravel on bare feet. I hear myself and know I need training in telling stories.

When I had gum surgery, the periodontist said I needed muscle relaxants to let my mouth heal because I clench my jaw at night. Lately I’ve learned to feel this and note what my body is telling me about how I'm holding my tongue, become tight. Sometimes my throat will catch like when tears are rising. My voice meets the world—braced, intense.

A few years ago, I thought about podcasting, but put the idea down because my voice reveals so much. It’s splintered like barn wood. You can hear the rafters and deep darkness in the loft where the cats hide and I store the hay. Overwhelm stopped me because the mechanics of getting a podcast set up looked too complicated. But Substack has made it easy to try so I bought a microphone and plugged it in. I may try breathing from my belly and standing up and see how that sounds for this one. It's hard to speak because I don't say much these days, though gravel roads can take you to some pretty countryside. 

A new friend, Meg Mittlestadt blessed this endeavor by observing, “Just that there’s long been a connection between work, prayer, poetry and the prophetic voice, meaning here, simply one that points the way…I think you also contain all of those things. So what you create would be an intercession, I think, just as you say. The podcasting simply allows a new medium of expression for you, perhaps.... your recorded voice felt natural, like you belonged in that realm.” (Check her Missives from the Edge Substack.)

Thank you for reading this. And a special thanks for those of you who are supporting me through a paid subscription, which supports this wonderful app, and has encouraged me to dig deep to write these essays regularly. I don’t like the idea of excluding any readers, because it’s more important for me to be read than to be paid. But payment is a wonderful encouragement. So thank you.

Work Cited

Whyte, David. The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul. Doubleday, 1996.