get the lead out: it’s noting, really: personas and masks

by Christine Swint

At a poetry reading in Decatur, Ga., I had the chance to hear Collin Kelley read from his collection, After the Poison (Finishing Line Press, 2008). He also read a poem included in a new journal called Motel 58, which looks like an interesting project. One of the poems Kelley read was a persona poem, which reminded me of my recent note taking on this topic.

A persona poem is one in which the poet assumes the voice of a character not his or her own, as if the writer were putting on a mask to communicate through the medium of the other. The more traditional term for persona poem is dramatic monologue, which is explained in the article “On Poetic Technique: Dramatic Monologue,” at poets.org, with links to some of the 19th- and 20th-century poets who popularized the technique.

There are two main reasons I’m collecting a cast of characters to inhabit in my poems. First, I enjoy using my imagination. I like to explore history and current events, to question motives, to create a dream, and even to dream someone else’s dream. In my journal, I’m recording tidbits about intriguing personalities who might serve as the narrative voice in future poems.

The other reason persona poems might be useful involves that delicate question, “how much of my own life am I ready to reveal?” Poets, and writers in general, are often plagued with self-doubt when it comes to mining their relationships for poetic inspiration — out of shame, embarrassment or even fear of reprisals from family members. Some poets choose to write about personal issues through the eyes of a historic character as a sort of veil to shield themselves from confessions they’re not comfortable with.
Even Sylvia Plath, well-known as a confessional poet, wrote “Lady Lazarus.” Maybe the wife of Lazarus provided Plath with yet another vehicle for exploring death and her relationships with men without naming names of people in her life.

An example of a contemporary poet who has explored persona poems is Cornelius Eady, National Book Award finalist for his collection Brutal Imagination (Putnam, 2001), which is ” … narrated largely by the black kidnapper that Susan Smith invented to cover up the killing of her two sons,” according to the publisher’s review.

In Eady’s poem “Tubman’s Rock,” the narrator is the voice of an inanimate object, a technique also known as personification. The difference between personification and dramatic monologue is that the inanimate object is the narrator of the poem, not just one aspect or image among many others.

One of my favorite poetry collections this year is Famous Last Words (Saturnalia, 2008), by Catherine Pierce, winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize for 2007. Famous Last Words is full of persona poems, such as “Love Poem to Sinister Moments” and “Love Poem to the Word Lonesome,” in which the narrator speaks directly to these abstract concepts as if they were living people.

The title of the collection comes from the poems in the third section, which are based on famous last words. Here is an example of one of them, published in Slate, titled “Last Meal.” Although the poem is written in the third person, Pierce uses interior monologue to get inside the head of gangster George Appel and his girlfriend, exploring their thoughts in the moments leading up to Appel’s execution.

If you think you’d like to write a persona poem or two, get the lead out and start jotting down characters who interest you or who might allow you to tell a story you’d be too inhibited to tell otherwise. Make a note of characters in literature who might represent you in some way or who spark your imagination.

And if you like, share with everyone a few of the characters whose lives you’d like to explore.

Please note that Christine has a new blog, Balanced on the Edge. Stop by and take a look at it. And make sure you update your RSS feeds and blogrolls to include her new URL. She’s also sharing another aspect of the persona poem on her site today at this post, so check it out: Who Is Speaking.