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85 The Physics of Persona Poems A. Van Jordan When we talk about the short story, we think of a moment in a character’s life that defines who this person is. In the persona poem, we have a similar artistic problem: we need to locate that person’s voice, but, more important, we need to locate where that voice is at this time in his or her life. The question I often ask of the persona is, why are we hearing this story now? That is to say, I want to know what the defining moment in the poem is that will reveal character. And if character is revealed, I want to know something as simple as What am I supposed to learn from this? What’s at stake here? These are valuable questions to ask of any poem, really, but I think the necessity is more pronounced when we talk about the persona. Indeed, the persona will surely fall short without attending to these questions. I like poems that take emotional risks. My first drafts often have emotion in the foreground of the poem; 90 percent of my revision process consists of pushing the emotions into the background. The emotional revelation of the first draft cannot be captured in subsequent drafts. After the first draft, the revision process becomes more intellectual than emotional. The persona poem calls for emotional resonance almost as a tenet of its tradition. I became particularly attracted to the persona poem because I found I just didn’t have the chops for it early on, so I started writing a lot of bad, sentimental personas and reading poets who had mastered this poem: Rita Dove, W. H. Auden, Robert Hayden, Ai, Patricia Smith, Norman Dubie, Chaucer, and others. In the process of the workshop, I find that many poets steer clear of sentimentality, often at the expense of emotion. As a result, I started asking poets in workshops to point out an emotional risk they were taking in the poem, to locate where the poem risked being sentimental. I started this because I was tired of reading so many sterile, emotionless poems in workshops and even literary journals. Some poets admitted that they )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 a. van jordan 86 didn’t “go there” because it was too close to family, it was too soon after a relationship, or they were afraid to reveal male vulnerability, and so on. The emotion in a poem is intimately connected to the tone of the poem. Tone not only holds emotion but also conveys emotion. And if we can say that tone conveys emotion, then there are ways in which the tone also conveys the character or persona. Going back to “memorable characters” in poetry, it’s often the tone of the persona that we remember: the enigmatic tone and truncated syntax of the alien in Hayden’s “American Journal”; the minstrelsy of Henry/Mr. Bones in John Berryman’s Dream Songs; the humor of the Wife of Bath. In fiction and drama, characters are developed through their actions. Speech, appearance, and even thoughts contribute to the development of character, but character is ultimately created through seeing characters in motion. In fact, these personas often do take action in the poem and, through an equation of action and tone, create character. But when we speak of the persona poem, “action” should be bracketed in quotes. There are moments in which the action is more in line with what Isaac Newton referred to as potential energy. Potential energy exists whenever an object that has mass holds a position within a force field. That is, it exists whenever an object has the potential to attempt to resist gravity. His equation was potential energy = mass × gravity × height above the earth’s surface. Thus, the legend of the low hanging apple (mass) falling (gravitational acceleration) from a tree’s limb (height above the earth’s surface). In a persona poem, the thoughts, history, motivations, and situation of a persona can all be potential energy. The persona, through any one of these elements, can be motivated to take action. Newton called action “kinetic energy.” Kinetic energy takes the equation for potential energy and factors in the velocity of the apple falling from the tree. So, one would ask how much potential energy is in a rubber band stretched to capacity. Answer: Possibly enough to shoot it across a classroom. How much kinetic energy is that? Answer: Enough to send it...

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