the slipperiness of persona
Recently, there was some grossness with questions of persona poetry (some white male poet who I had never heard of but who is apparently on the rise) did what amounted to digital blackface. Apologies were issued, even from editors, and there was some continuing discussion about persona poetry and the ethics of taking on voices other than your own--in this case, and in others that have arisen over the years-particularly the voice of the marginalized, who should have the opportunity to have their own voices added to the conversation without being filtered through the lens of privilege and remove. That someone else's story--particularly those that deal with identity and marginalization--are not fertile plucking ground to work out your own issues as a writer. Basically don't be a an asshole and try to speak for others, not only whose experience you know nothing about, but also whose chance for their own voices & experiences to be heard will be impeded by yours.
It's tricky ground, and even outside issues of identity and marginalization, it's problematic. I've been thinking about this as I work on the Slender Man series about the Waukesha stabbing--a case in which all of the involved girls are still very much alive and able to speak for themselves. Maybe less a discomfort with persona --after all, I was also once a 12 year old girl in a midwest town who had slumber parties and went skating--a miliion sleepovers that sound exactly like theirs only no stabbings in the woods, this is perhaps why the story has appealed to me. Just replace Slender Man with Bloody Mary in the pre-internet days. I was awkward and only had a couple of close friends, and not a slumber party went by where there wasn't some pre-teen squabble that marred the event. But maybe it's more that I am still writing from the outside for all intensive purposes. That while it's somehow not so hard to speak for the dead, speaking for the living is another thing altogether.
I've written persona, or something like persona--poems before obviously--my entire first chapbook The Archaeologist's Daughter, was devoted to poems about historical characters, mythological subjects, people plucked from art and literature. There were poems about mermaids, gold rush brides, Degas' dancers, Salem witches. Most were addressed as a "you" so were maybe not the "I" of traditional persona writing. Later, I wrote an entire series devoted to Resurrection Mary, but then again, writing about a ghost or urban legend is very different from writing about an in-the-flesh person. I used a bunch of different lenses with that projects, and there is some variation in address. Some are addressed to you, the ghost, some are I when I am speaking as narrator, some are third person omniscient. Perhaps the greatest concentration of more persona oriented pieces happens in girl show. Of course, there is a fine line between invented people and those based on real people. I did a lot of sideshow research, so some of the women are based on people who existed--the siamese twins of "double tongue" being the most readily apparent, certain details in other poems. But I suppose there are also a number of "I" voice poems of made up characters--the magicians assistant of "dissassembling maria", the dancer in "constellations of girls in red, the rotund high diver of "la grande plongeuse. "
According to simplest definition of persona poems, it involves the poet speaking in, taking on a voice that is different from the poet "self, but I'm not sure what happens when even that "self" is sort of slippery and moves back and forth between first , second and third person, which happens in girl show just as much as it does in the Resurrection Mary poems. Regardless, it's a wholly different thing at a certain remove when the subjects of your work are real, breathing people. Maybe in this way, it's a discomfort akin to when you are mining real life for poetry fodder. Early on, the first time my parent's came to hear me read, I told them the "mother" and "father" are not them, or at least at that time, were less so them and more fictional characters. My own mother was nothing like the distant, untouchable, unreachable mothers in the the fever almanac. The fathers in that book either missing or somehow foreboding. Even though the narrator of the poem spoke with an "I" in that book on occasion, it is perhaps the speaker least like me of all books . There are barely any "I'"s at all in in the bird musuem, a smattering in girl show, and shared properties... has a third person narrator. The first book where the I sounds even remotely like myself is major characters, but even again, the I, she's slippery and untrustable, and that carries through salvage and into little apocalypse.
In some ways, it feels like everything is persona, but then if everything is, maybe nothing is. Still, as I was working on necessary violence I've been cautious about that persona-hood. About the possibility that the involved would one day read this exterior version of their lives. So what do we do with this burden? My sister, who is working on the visual elements of what will be the final project mentioned on FB yesterday that she was keeping her visuals more in line with Slender Man myth and less about the particulars in order to not possibly re-traumatize the victim should she ever see them. In writing the project, I am most uncomfortable with her. The other girls are sympathetic, in that they are probably not monsters--just a product of un-diagnosed mental illness, extreme unusual suceptibility to fantasy, and the internet's darker corners. But how do we deal with the party most injured by all of this (though reports and media say she is actually growing up and handling it all quite well--she's a survivor, and apparently thriving.) But even in my pieces, she is not the focus, and sometimes I feel like she should be, and maybe these are the pieces I still need to write. The other girls fall into a collective "we: that by extension becomes all 12 year old girls with a love of the dark things, if not violent tendencies. That powder keg of adolescence where something can go terribly wrong (which in most cases the wrong is not attempted murder, but traumatic nonethless.) The weird father/savior implications of the Slender Man imaginings. There are fragments that are more focused on the mythology and the internet, and others focused on the particulars of that Saturday morning, but there are probably more made up details than true ones.
I'm not sure I have the answers to these questions, but am thinking out loud about this project in particular. How to handle writing about the living when they still have their own voices, but still being able to inhabit their stories in your own voice. Even in cases where the obvious rules--don't be an asshole, don't take on other people's stories and claim them for yourself, don 't further marginalize the marginalized, are not really applicable...
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