"Everything
is a story we tell ourselves about who and what we are, and who and
what everyone else is, and what we must do, and what we ought to do and
why we ought to do it. Each of us has a story, or many stories, and each
of us in one way or another is the leading character in the life and
death narrative we play out with our lives in our languages. If there
are problems, it isn't usually because we have erected ourselves as the
main character in our story, so much as because we are unwilling to
embrace the possibility that at its source it is all a inspired
collaboration."
- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING
Words
come to life in human voice, the same way that stories come to life in
their telling. They require the voice - our voice - that most ancient
instrument of the human, being human. When I first started performing my
poetry, many years ago, people would come up to me after a reading, and
say: "you made those poems sound better than they really are." I could
never understand that sort of comment.
To me, I simply gave them the sound they had, using a voice that loved
their words, their rhythms, their music. Words are lures for feeling,
and so are stories. When they are alive in the mouth that speaks them,
that plays them, they draw us all into the old circle that humans have
always made for themselves every time they have allowed a story or a
poem or a song, its voice. They wait on us, patiently, with our
seemingly interminable silences, hoping for a chance to be heard, to
make some palpable shape in a world that - without out - might otherwise
fade and die. The world is changed by them, and and so is the sayer,
the teller, out of whose mouths they come to life. All the best writing
is for the ears, not the eyes. - Billy Marshall Stoneking
