just one (book) thing: stacey lynn brown’s ‘cradle song’

by Jessica Fox-Wilson

Cradle Song by Stacey Lynn Brown

“The literal truth of a poem is much less important to me than its emotional core and relevance.”

Just One (Book) Thing, and its sister column, Just One (Chapbook) Thing, are two of the new columns we’re sharing each month here at Read Write Poem. The idea of the columns is to share books and chapbooks with our participants in a fresh way. Rather than doing a book review or a long-form interview, I will read a poetry collection every month, and Nathan Moore will read a chapbook collection every month. Then we’ll ask each author one single question — the one thing we really want to know, and share with you, after experiencing each work.

We hope you find the Just One Thing columns to be entertaining and informative. And we hope the authors’ responses to our questions make you want to pick up their collections and find out more about their work.

For the inaugural Just One (Book) Thing interview, I chose to interview Stacey Lynn Brown, author of the debut collection Cradle Song (C&R Press, 2009). The book is ambitious, a collection of 41 linked poems that tell the story of a young, Southern white girl raised by an African-American nursemaid and caregiver. All the poems are written in persona, using the voices of the young girl, the nursemaid and the girl’s mother. Through these voices, Brown reveals the undercurrent of race, class and gender that has shaped these three women’s lives.

The use of persona in the book is remarkable because each character is distinct, from the tough-talking Gaither (the nursemaid) to the quietly rebellious mother. Brown captures the cadences and emotions of each character, without drifting into sentimentality or stereotype. Instead, the reader feels drawn into these characters’ worlds, watching as their relationships shift, evolve and strain as they age.

Considering her use of persona for a full-length book, I chose to ask the author about the strengths and limitations of the character’s perspective, in contrast to the autobiographical “I.” Below is my question and her response.

What do you feel you can accomplish by writing in persona that you cannot accomplish by writing in an autobiographical voice?

As with any construct in poetry, there are limitations and possibilities inherent in both persona and the autobiographical “I,” but I don’t actually see them as being mutually exclusive. Each one relies upon and, to some degree, incorporates the other. An autobiographical poem isn’t necessarily striving to represent or replicate the author in full. Instead, it creates a version of the author that is not unlike a persona. Similarly, a straight-ahead persona poem relies upon the poet’s own personal experience and his or her self-awareness and knowledge of the human condition to be accessible and resonant.

What I was hoping to do in Cradle Song was to navigate the space between the two by incorporating both. I wanted to create a more fully realized portrait of a time and place by presenting different perspectives on the events that are discussed. So there are poems in the narrator’s voice, which is a closer, more autobiographical voice that skips back and forth between the child-like and the adult, and there are poems that are written as “memories,” stories that were told to me in the voices of the people who told them. While they are technically persona poems in that they represent a speaker other than the author, they exist somewhere in the space between the imagined and the remembered.

My hope with any poem, regardless of its construct, is that it accomplishes some level of emotional truth — not that it follows the arc of what really happened but rather that it reveal something important about why those things that happened, or didn’t happen, matter. The literal truth of a poem is much less important to me than its emotional core and relevance. Like Richard Hugo said, “You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” If you can write a poem that reveals and resonates emotionally, it accomplishes its goal, regardless of how real or imagined the speaker might be.

Order Cradle Song from C&R Press. Learn more about Stacey Lynn Brown by visiting her website and blog. Read sample poems from Cradle Song here.

Jessica Fox-Wilson is a columnist for Read Write Poem. Her work includes the Read Write Word prompts every month and the Just One (Book) Thing column. Visit her at her blog, Everything Feeds Process.