Imagine me and you, and you and me…
One of the standard exercises for fiction writers is to write a story from the point of view of an inanimate object. It’s rather hard to do well, honestly, largely because so many new writers can’t resist the temptation to hide the ball (or whatever object they are) until the end of the story, and it ends up feeling contrived and rather silly, since obviously the ball knows it’s a ball.
We’re going to do the opposite of that—well, sort of—in this month’s poetry slam, and embrace becoming an object or person that knows exactly who and what they are. That’s the idea behind persona in poetry. The poet becomes someone/thing that they’re not, writing in first or tight third person to give insight into the self-awareness of the narrator of the poem.
That sounds more confusing than it is. Persona is a technique that’s much easier to show than to describe, so read through these poems and see if you can figure out what that last paragraph meant.
Memphis Resurrection
Who died and made you Elvis?
—Bumper sticker
The big rock by my door
is a plaster prop, after
all. I’m back to hear
screams for what I can’t
do, couldn’t do forty
years ago. Awkward
pelvic thrusts fooled
the camera and virgins,
but I have no more fish-
fry tunes left to dress
up on brand new plates.
This time around,
I spend all day singing
cracked Mississippi
homilies. Why
did I want to live
forever in the first place?
Salvation felt better dead,
floating home free
while my bones, secret
and brown, mingle
with old dirt.
One Fire, Quenched with Another
1.
Pained as he was when he gazed
upon his father’s face, he held his gaze.
2.
Toward what he’d never known, he walked,
somehow both arrogant & begging.
The purple of his father’s robes, like a bruise.
3.
As a river, over time, can forge
a way through stone, so
absence bore through him,
leaving a valley where his voice
echoes off the canyon walls.
4.
His mind had narrowed until all it held
was an idea of father, until so fixed on the idea
his mind seemed under siege. Inside him hummed
a longing, one he felt compelled to fix, so named it flaw.
5.
What the boy wanted:
to finally know his father’s face.
Evidence, at last, of his origin.
6.
Felt within, a longing.
Felt and therefore knew
a weakness he wanted to master.
7.
A desire to know, and a belief
he deserved to,
these were the human parts of him.
8.
Fiery, Dawnsteed, Scorcher, Blaze–
the horses the father owned,
the horses the father, knowing he would fail, let his son steer–
9.
is this devotion?
10.
To master, control, rein in;
hoping this might prove him
a man, perhaps, a god.
11.
There are gaps knowing cannot fill.
12.
What boy has not dreamt himself a noble son,
has not prematurely thought himself a man?
13.
He lost control of the reins
& the horses did what one expects
from animals whose lives had always been
tightly squeezed between two fists:
14.
breaking from the path they’d always known,
15.
they galloped nearer to that world from which they’d been kept,
16.
not out of malice but a kind of mercy
17.
for the world the father feared the horses would destroy.
18.
Finding himself at the mercy of what he’d sought–
19.
gone too far to turn back, gone far beyond his father now
with further still to go, ignorant of the names
of the horses behind whom he was now dragged like the tail
of a comet hurtling toward earth, as in all directions
he sees the destruction he’d caused:
the flames licking trees at their roots, licking
dry the ocean’s mouth, licking the faces
of each living thing until they’d turned to ash,
until the world without grew hotter than the world within,
until a dizzying heat rose from the soil, until in his feet
20.
the boy could feel the world ablaze–
21.
free me from these reins
he cried perhaps to god,
perhaps to father,
22.
the difference indecipherable, more or less insignificant
23.
for even though he’d met him, the boy still knew himself
24.
fatherless, godless, no less abandoned than he’d been.
25.
The world to which, for better or worse, he once belonged, now gone,
26.
he belonged nowhere…
27.
To save what could be saved, to salvage what had not been lost,
to punish his failure to master what no other ever had: the boy
28.
was struck dead & buried
29.
beside a river, which began again to flow toward the distant mouth
30.
out of which, it would finally empty.
The Angel with the Broken Wing
BY DANA GIOIA
I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.
The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.
Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.
I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.
I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.
For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.
There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.
I am the walrus (goo goo g’joob)
Sorry about the Beatles reference. I’m my father’s kid, I guess.
The good news for this month’s slam is that you’re not constrained by a form or format. So you’re free to look around and pick an object you see, a thing out of myth (I’d love to read a poem from the POV of Sisyphus’ boulder), an artifact in a museum, or just that guy at the bus stop over there, dutifully masked up but staring at a carton of cigarettes.
For the next little bit, you’re going to step into the shoes of that person or object, and let yourself describe yourself and your role, your effect in the world. Remember the Red Wheelbarrow, on which so much depends? Is the wheelbarrow anxious? Is it heavy with water, ready to become … something? “I am” doesn’t have to be followed by something prosaic in a persona poem, either. It could be “I am the last hope of home” or “I’m a leaf on the wind, watch me…” Uh. Still maybe too soon for that one, sorry, nerds.
You can be as strictly and formally poetic as you like, or more prosaic, but don’t forget how to poem just because you’re narrating. You’ve still got to do more than write some sentences with weird line breaks thrown in. Go ahead and play with the additional techniques and forms you know. A villanelle from a needle’s POV? A sonnet from a bonnet? A eulogy for the ant that other ant is carrying down the sidewalk? The sky’s the limit. Wait, I think that one’s an aubade, right?
If that feels TOO much like freedom, try this: Find a museum or gallery that is tweeting or texting its collection, like SFMOMA or these eight other museums (MERL is especially entertaining), and grab a random object. Then personify that object (or a portion of it, like one figure in a painting) in your poem.
See you on the grid!
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
