As I round the bend on the GRANATA project, I find myself debating the book's point-of-view. I initially fully intended to use first person, and the first 10 or so poems are written with an "I" narrative. Slowly, it began to slip, and my much favored "you" slipped in--the second person I favor so often over anything else these past years, not so much a conscious decision, but a go-to. I like the second person since the poems have a persona-like poem feel without actually taking on the limited persona of the "I" voice. Lately, the daily poems are "you" driven, and if they stay that way, I will probably just give over to the majority, partly because obviously I want them that way, right?.
Guidelines for the heroic/heroinic epic I intend would probably have me doing third person. Odysseus, for example does not tell his own story, but relies on Homer to do it for him. Maybe second person is a good compromise here, and something I reach for in my poetic bag of tricks far more often than the third or first person. If I do use first, it's far more often a "we" rather an "I."
In ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MONSTER, I go back and forth. The series of "artist statements" is first person singular but "extinction event" is first person plural. Mr. Potter poems are a little bit of everything, as is "pelt" where I go back and forth between "you" and "she, and probably break some sort of cardinal rule about persistent p-o-v, but it felt right somehow, so I kept it. That series is about the slipperiness of identity and self between two women, so what is more slippery than p-o-v.?
GRANATA, is of course, an epic, so it demands I settle on one or other I suppose. I have been trying to listen daily to what the poems want to tell me, and by extension to what Persephone herself wants to tell me, so we will see how that plays out. In other news, I was working on something else entirely in the visual arena and created the above collage--I didn't plan for visual work to accompany these pieces, but that may also be a surprise development.
