Back from a cool and rainy beach, where we saw the following: six baby peacocks and a white parent peacock, ten baby quail and parents, a mother and baby racoon, 12,000 fawns and various deer, otters, harbour seals, and a multitude of seagulls. After reading Lucia Perillo’s I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, I can even identify the kinds of seagulls. Yes, that’s my takeaway from the poet’s book: the wildlife biology.

Well, I came back to a Tempest on the Wompo list over whether writing poetry in persona was proper, ethical, allowable, etc. I had to write a little post on the topic, and here it is:

Dear Wompo crowd,
My goodness! What a passionate discussion about something I thought was an accepted truth in our literary world – that the speaker is not the poet. We do not assume writers of plays, or novels, or songs, etc must always write as themselves, but somehow the poet is expected to do so. I love to write dramatic monologues and fiction, but I happen to be a poet, so I use persona poetry.
Perhaps it’s because of some of my favorite poets write in persona, such as Gluck and Margaret Atwood and Lucille Clifton, to name a few, or perhaps I find persona poetry a nice contrast, to the I-was-walking-through-the-woods-and-had-this-epiphany poem you find all over the place or the sixties-era confessionalism that still seems to be one of the main modes today. I hope we can all agree there’s room for that kind of poetry, and for poetry that allows us to create character, plot, and dialogue in our minds as well.
In a little class I prepared for college students, I talked about the benefits – or the reasons why – of writing persona poetry.
Here’s a condensed version:
-Empathy. Allowing us to put ourselves in the shoes of the “other.”
-Imagination. Getting out of the prison of your own life and circumstances, and into someone else’s. Or a different universe altogether. This is one of the reasons it is the mode of writing I’m most strongly drawn to.
-Especially for women, allowing their full range of voice in a society that may or may not be happy to hear what they’re thinking or feeling. The three poets above (Gluck, Atwood, and Clifton) are pretty sly in the way they critique society through their personas, in ways they would maybe not be able to get away with writing as themselves. I’m also thinking of HD here. There’s a social aspect to giving voices to the voiceless…the midrash – to re-writing mythology and history by using a woman character’s voice to critique the social situations they found/find themselves in. I mean, Mary Magdalene didn’t get to write her own story. or Leda, Philomel, Helen of Troy. Or, come to think of it, Wonder Woman. Sure, these women are fictional, but don’t they deserve to be heard?
The two cents of a passionate persona poetry lover and writer, Jeannine Hall Gailey