Creative Writing: Persona, Concrete, and Language Poems

Creative Writing: Persona, Concrete, and Language Poems

Persona Poems

We've discussed the element of "voice" in creative writing. Jeff Knorr and Tim Schell speak of voice in the poem as "the expressive force and tone of the words spoken by the author and the persona of the poem." The persona is the speaker of the poem.

Persona poems are also called dramatic poems. There consist of two main types:

dramatic monologues where only one person speaks
multi-voice poems which feature more than one speaker

Assuming the voice of a historical or imagined figure in a poem can free the writer. The Greek word "persona" means mask. In dramatic poems that's exactly what the writer does, he or she dons a mask and writes from another person's point of view. Even in poems which use "I" as a narrator, writers often represent another person's thoughts or feelings. Persona poems allow you to stretch your style and allow you to attribute emotions and feelings from a less vulnerable perspective. Remember that the narrator guides your reader through the poem. Examples of writers who have written in this format include Robert Browning, Norman Dubie, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, and Rita Dove.

Closely entwined with the speaker of a poem is the poem's sense of place. The physical world with its sights, smells, and sounds should be more than a backdrop for your poetry. It should be specific, detailed, and central to the thrust of your poem. Your persona character must be shaped by the physical reality and culture of a specific place. Yeats said that a poet's words have "to be wedded to the natural figures of his or her native landscape."

Also, diction (the choice of words, the way words are strung together) becomes a vital element in persona poems. Make sure that your language is language that your character would have used, or at least will appear authentic to the reader. In other words don't write a dramatic monologue about Queen Elizabeth and intersperse slang by Madonna.

Remember to choose if possible, a critical moment in the historical figure's life. Also, use details: clothing, fashion, and objects of the time period.

Here is a brief example of a persona poem. Note that the author writes in the dead soldier's voice.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

-- -- Randall Jarrell

As poet Louis Simpson said, "The words of poems should become transparent." Nobel prize winner Octavio Paz said, "Every word implies two persons: the one who speaks and the one who hears."

Point of View in Poetry

One of the first choices a poet must make when beginning a new poem is choosing the point of view of the narrator. Point of view is a concept also vital to fiction. A character's point of view can be any of the following:

First person singular—	I	(commonly used)
Second person singular or plural	You	(poetry addressed to the reader)
Third person singular	He, She, It
First person plural	We	(much rarer)
Third person plural	They	(very rare)

Note: With third person narrators, the writer can choose a limited point of view, or an objective point of view. In the objective point of view, the writer does not include observations from inside the narrator's head, only external facts. In the limited point of view, the narrator describes the world as viewed by one person, the narrator.

Concrete Poetry

Concrete poetry came into vogue after World War II. It can be defined as visual poetry, or poetry for the page. The author uses typography and graphic patterns to express his or her ideas. Words and even punctuation marks give shape to the poem. Most concrete poems are, in fact, ideograms-- graphic symbols of the objects described.

The art movements of Surrealism, Dada, Bauhaus influenced this poetry. Some practitioners included ee cummings, Jackson MacLow, Johanna Drucker, Sandra Jackman, and Jack Hirschman.

Follow the link to a concrete poem by Ian Hamilton Finlay, a Scottish artist and poet: http://jacketmagazine.com/15/ihf-pix/poster-poem.gif

e.e.cummings wrote many visual poems. Note how the shape of the poem creates pauses when you read the poem out loud.

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af
fa

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one
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iness

Some Notes on Revision

The most important step you can make in revising is to try to look at the work as objectively as possible. Look at your poem as though someone else wrote it. This can be done most easily by allowing time between the composing, drafting, and final revision process.

In The Poet's Companion, authors Addonizio and Laux state that "Revision is the poet's most difficulty, demanding, and dangerous work. Difficult because it's hard to let go of our original inspirations or ideas or our best lines, as we may have to do in the service of the poem. Demanding because it calls for us to reach deeper or further than we may want to, or feel we know how to. Dangerous because we feel we might, in the act of trying to make a good poem better, lose touch with the raw energy that drove the poem into its fullness to begin with and destroy what we have so joyously created." Laux and Addonizio also reminds us that many poems begin with "throat-clearing" or extra lines before we really enter the heart of the poem.

Revise for sound, for music upon the page, for sense, for mystery, for connotation*, for denotation*. Examine each line and stanza break carefully. Remember that the words at the beginning and end of each line carry more weight, as do the lines at the beginning and end of each stanza. First lines and titles count very much also. Make sure you have chosen the right word, not the almost right word. Remember Mark Twain's maxim about the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."

Because we are so close to the events and experiences of the poems, we often include unnecessary, even distracting details. Keep in mind what Mary Oliver said, "Poems begin in experience, but poems are not in fact experience, nor even a necessarily exact reportage of an experience. They are imaginative constructs, and they do not exist to tell us about the poet or the poet's actual experience—they exist to be poems."

* connotation: to suggest or convey associations as well as the literal meaning of a word. For example mother means a "female parent" but also connotes "love, caring, tenderness."

* denotation: to give the direct, explicit meaning of a word. For example to buy, meaning to purchase.

How to Make Better Poems

1. Think of sounds and music as being vitals component of your poetry. Use alliteration, assonance, consonance. Play with sound in your poetry, and make sure your poems are rich in sound. See Dylan Thomas's poem "Fern Hill" below for a great example of rich use of sound in poetry.

2. Think in terms of poetic "density." Words in poems must do multiple tasks. They must provide music, they must provide meaning, but they also must evoke feelings. Remember that all words have denotative meanings—their literal definitions. They also have connotative associations, meaning they bring to mind other associated words. For example, in Roethke's poem "The Waking" the word wake means to come out of sleep but also to be alive.

3. Although I've said that mystery is a wonderful element in poetry, don't make the identity of your narrator mysterious. Make sure that the reader clearly knows who the narrator is in your poems. Sometimes in dramatic monologues you can do this by including a line under the title, which identifies the speaker.

For Example "Hollywood Blues"
Marilyn Monroe, 1962

4. Don't forget the sensual details. Poems definitely need details that the reader can connect with his or her sense memories. Mary Oliver said that poems need enough details to "sustain the reader's passage into the imagined world of the poem." She calls this "texture" and says that it makes the poem an "experience, something much more than mere statement."

5. Finally keep in mind the concept of breath in poetry. Poet Robert Hass said, "There's a sense in which poetry is not so much the writing of words as much as it is the movement of breath itself. To write it you must pay attention to the breathing of poetry, to all speech as breath, to the relationship of our thoughts and emotions and the actual way they fill our bodies. This is the emotional, physical centering of the activity of poetry."

Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas (1st three stanzas)

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
      Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952,

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