An Exercise in Artifice: On Writing "See Me Slant . . ."

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

I cannot recall the idea that precipitated my trespass into the world of the poets, to write an essay in which I assumed the persona of Poetry herself. I might tell you that the sky stretched out in one of those indigo swaths upon which the stars appear as scattered trinkets, or that I awoke on an autumn morning before the sun and heard the call of coyotes, or even that I encountered Poetry's mother while beachcombing and she was mud-colored, white-haired, wild-eyed, and as benevolent as hot cocoa. I might say any of those things—they all fit the conceit of "See Me Slant"—but none of them are true.

The truth: I was applying for grant money. Enough to keep me financially stable for two years while I wrote. The grantor provided three quotes from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, asking applicants to choose one of those quotes and craft an "artistic response." In various professional incarnations, I had written many a grant proposal, only to discover that such endeavors drained my creative juices, rather like a moon snail sucks the flesh of a clam out through a tiny hole drilled in the shell. I had no desire to slip into the vernacular of fundraising, a language currently defined by nouns such as outcomes or targets and verbs such as achieve and implement. Such words, to quote a dear friend whose daughter reads Derrida as if it were a recipe for brisket, "make my hair hurt." I also felt unable to adopt a scholarly guise—not that I disdain the rigor of academe, just that in my writing, I had left behind the university. I wanted, in the words of Monty Python, to do "something completely different."

I selected the shortest of the quotes, "Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father." Why? The sentiment appealed to me. When I was younger and more ardently disposed to point out inequities between men and women, if I heard someone call Edvard Munch the father of expressionism, I would retort that Käthe Kollwitz was its mother—a remark that garnered me many a strange look, mostly from people who thought of Kollwitz as a graphic or documentary artist because she worked primarily as a printmaker and in black and white. I liked the pragmatism of Woolf's remark—if one were to say that something was the product of a father, it would be impossible to deny that thing a mother. And yet that is exactly what had happened with art of any kind: many fathers were celebrated with pedestals and biographies, but the mums were strangely absent.

I could have written an essay naming all those forgotten mothers, decrying the bias-by-omission tactic of the academy and the lopsidedness of The Canon, but a surfeit of eloquent ripostes have satisfied Woolf's invitation to prove that Poetry, indeed, has an infinite number of mothers. Not to mention some great-grandmothers, grandmothers, and godmothers, stretching from Sappho to Kenyon to Dove.

The other truth: I wanted to write something that proved I might be able to do what essayists do, which is to say, adopt a persona—to, as E. B. White describes it, "pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to . . . mood or subject matter." Why not write a persona essay, conceived in the same way as a poet composes a persona poem? The form-matches-content serendipity was as delicious as one of Woolf's moments of being: I would write a persona essay about the mother of Poetry, a craft renowned for fashioning speakers who hide behind masks. I would use one fact about life with my real mother (that she made me practice walking with a dictionary balanced on my head), one truth about what she gave me (a passion for language and poetry), but the...