A few notes on persona poetry

Someone asked if I would blog a little about persona poetry to make up for the fact that I missed giving a pedagogy paper on the same subject at AWP, so I will! It would be boring if I just posted the paper here, so I’ll write about why I personally like writing persona poems, how I discovered them, and why I think they’re useful in a classroom.

I really had not discovered contemporary female poetry until I was in college – Plath, Gluck, H.D., Atwood, Rita Dove and Lucille Clifton. I was engaged and enraptured. One thing I could not help but notice was how many of these writers wrote in personas: male and female, angel and demon, flower and stone, Gretel in Darkness and Helen of Troy as a stripper. Why, I wondered, had so many female poets taken up this strategy for writing? What did it do for them? What could it do for me?

One boundary that many women, at least in our society, feel is the boundary of being “nice,” and “likeable.” And many women poets write nice, likable poems about their nice, likable lives. But those poems did not interest me. The first time I read “Daddy” (which, by the way, I took to be a persona poem) I laughed out loud – I thought it was hilarious, unbounded; it was like reading a lightning storm. Gluck’s Meadowlands had a similar effect. Atwood, of course, practices the art of the tart-tongued villainess in her fiction and her poetry like nobody’s business.

So I wanted in. Tentatively I took steps towards various personas: my first were in the voice of Philomel, because at the time I was reading a lot of Ovid and TS Eliot (I think now that at least one of TS Eliot’s alter egos, or maybe is anima-self, was Philomel, the violated young girl who is a very strong presence in “The Waste Land.”) Then I explored more characters: Wonder Woman (a ubiquitous presence in my childhood), the wicked stepmother, mermaids and melusines.

Allowing me to write outside of the lines, so to speak, on the edges and fragments of story lines, was wonderfully freeing – here, I could make up the story and character as I went along. Why, I wonder, was persona poetry so attractive to me? And what benefits might it have for poetry students today?

Well, here’s my little list, in a nutshell:

–It gives poets some of the creative freedoms of the fiction writer: character and plot, mythic landscapes – to me, a much more fun place to play than say, my own backyard. Because I can only write so many poems about my own fascinating life.
Using our imaginations = good.

–It helps writers extend and exercise empathy for the “other;” it allows us to imagine what it’s like in other people’s shoes. This one’s pretty self-explanatory – you just have to get in the mindset of someone else to write a poem in their voice – and often, we surprise ourselves by really identifying with characters we thought we had nothing in common with. Expanding our own (and our students’) humanity, to put it grandly. If you don’t some empathy with the character you’re writing, the poem will sound false, incomplete. Again, this is an exercise in humanism and imagination. It’s harder to create an “us” and “them” when you work really hard to get into “their” mindset. Have a Democrat write a poem as a Republican; a girl write a poem in a boy’s voice; and of course, my favorite: assign them the task of writing (and humanizing) the villain of a story.

–It allows a writer to re-write history and mythology; any group that has been left out of the hero position for a long time has got to like that. Subversion isn’t just a graduate school catchphrase – it is a real and powerful tool to rebalance the world in our own writing, a way to challenge conventional thought, and a way to address issues of inequality. I recommend having students pick two opposing characters from a folk tale, comic book, or myth, and writing a poem in each voice. I’ve always gotten wonderful work, at least one really good poem, from this exercise.

–A last reason, which is really more psychological than anything else, is that writing in persona allows us to free the shadow self; any restrictions (or false memories) we might place on our autobiographical writing tends to disappear when writing in persona. Now, it doesn’t really protect the writer; after all, there’s a reason any writer chooses the speakers they do, and the emotions they choose to reflect are still aspects of their own selves. But writing in persona can trick us, momentarily, into freedom while we write.