Finding your true voice for writing

Simon Armitage talks about the idea of a poet finding their true voice (from 'The Verb' 21st April 2017 on BBC Radio 3; this conversation started approximately 21 minutes into the programme). Ian McMillan asks "do you think you have to find a true voice?"

I think that's become a very convenient shorthand for blurb writers on the backs of books: "he has found his voice and he has found it early". In fact, I think it might have said that on the back of one of my books... as if it were there waiting under a stone and you just had to have a good rummage around the garden and you would come across this thing called 'your voice'. Because I think probably more realistically what happens is that when you start writing, you are experimenting, you're shopping around, you are writing portfolio collections, and what you notice eventually is that one version of your voice seems to be appreciated over others - and that's probably the voice that you start using in your poetry because you can see that it's an appealing one.