Poetry is a trickster of a genre: not fiction, not nonfiction, but also not not them: both/and, either/or. Likely predating the written word, poetry in ancient times saved and circulated information worth remembering, facts and fictions: history, genealogy, myths, legends, declarations of love.
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Somewhere along the line, the concept of “the speaker” emerged—a hybrid of nonfiction’s rule that the narrator is the author, and fiction’s rule that the narrator is not the author but an imagined character.
With “the speaker,” poetry’s narration occupies a flirty, winking middle space: Who’s to say if the narrator is the author? Even when a poem insists on its nonfictional nature, as “Come On All You Ghosts” by Matthew Zapruder does (“in this poem // every word means exactly / what it means / when we use it in every day life”), the rules of poetry dictate that the “I” is never exactly the author—but the author in a costume, or another voice entirely.
This conceit can be liberatory. In an interview about her collection, Bianca, on the complexity of overcoming trauma from physical and emotional abuse in childhood, Eugenia Leigh says, “My first real interaction with poetry as a child showed me poetry could tell the truth when I was not allowed to say the truth.” The speaker may offer plausible deniability for safety: the “I” said it, not me.
On her collection, The Renunciations, confronting childhood sexual abuse, Donika Kelly reflects on how persona offers a shield from vulnerability. In these poems, a figure called the Oracle can “see the future, remember the past, and understand things in a way I couldn’t.” Persona grants the author access: “Sometimes it’s easier to get closer to the feeling from behind the mask.”
With “the speaker,” poetry’s narration occupies a flirty, winking middle space: Who’s to say if the narrator is the author?
It can also grant her escape: When the feeling is overwhelming, the “mask or veil” is a reminder of separation.
I love the concept of the speaker as a mask or veil. As readers, we’re aware of the person beneath the mask, but we also willingly suspend our disbelief. We’re in cahoots with the author in a shared alternate reality. In her column for The New York Times, Elisa Gabbert writes: “While persona is too strong to apply to some first-person lyrics, the speaker implies all lyrics wear a veil of persona, at least, if not a full mask.”
It must have been a decade ago when I first saw the work of photographer Charles Fréger, who documented the vestiges of masked ritual traditions across Europe in his 2012 book, Wilder Mann. I’ll never forget the first image I saw, of babugeri—Bulgarian folk figures—in a field against a white fog.
“Three figures with uncanny silhouettes, furred necks stretched plantlike toward the sun” is how I describe them in my poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, which plays with monsters and myths, and features several persona poems about a “local beast.” In Fréger’s photo, the men beneath the goat furs are almost entirely obscured, but then we see a flash of finger.
The poet in me thrilled at these defamiliarized human shapes. The poet in me also wanted badly to be inside the fearsome garment, myself obscured.
In The Faeries’ Oracle deck by artist Brian Froud (of Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal fame), a card called Sylvanius features a figure about to don a large, winged mask. The guidebook by Jessa Macbeth informs us that Froud originally entitled the card “The Mask of Truth, True Dreaming.”
This faery mask’s purpose is to help us “to look inward, seeing our true selves.” As anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed, “the mask serves as the medium for men to enter into relations with the supernatural world.”
So: the speaker may function to alter the author’s “appearance” to readers, but it also functions—as a mask can—to alter the author’s (the wearer’s) consciousness. This is very much in line with Gabbert’s observation that “the poem always gives my own I, my mind’s I, the magic ability to say things I wouldn’t in speech or in prose….The poem has more surprising thoughts than I do.”
Writing from a voice not necessarily tied to our biography can help us access different thinking, an external transformation creating an internal one.
Wearing a mask can be useful, then. But it can also simply be fun to share a context in which it’s cool to be other than what you are. See: Halloween. See: The Met Gala.
Just a few persona poems that feel like costumes in fun and affecting ways: “The Ape God Addresses Mononoke” by Steven Duong, “The Hypno-Domme Speaks, and Speaks and Speaks” by Patricia Lockwood, “Biopsy as Sea Creature” by L.S. McKee, “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” by Morgan Parker, and “I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise” by Diane Seuss. These poems announce the speaker’s departure from the author before they even begin, the titles functioning like changed outfits.
Poems can function as ritual spaces.
But even when the speaker does not assume a particular named character or recognizable figure—when perhaps it more closely resembles the author—it might be granted supernatural powers. The speaker in Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s verse novel Dreaming of You conducts a séance and resurrects Selena Quintanilla. In a poem entitled “Conversation with Mary” in Gabrielle Bates’s Judas Goat, the speaker interviews the virgin mother across time and space.
This is what some of the oldest rituals across humankind have done and do: transform the appearance of everyday people into something mythical, archetypal, or otherworldly; shift consciousness; fabricate a context in which fantastical abilities or influence are possible.
Folk customs are having a bit of a renaissance right now. Last year, the artist Ben Edge published Folklore Rising, documenting folk customs across Britain. It includes one of the best sentences I’ve ever read: “As the trees were blessed, groups of Mari Lwyds stood snapping their jaws menacingly at pieces of toast that had been strung up from apple trees.”
Mari Lwyds are horse skeletons in shawls who visit Welsh houses at Yuletide and challenge residents to poem-battles. If you lose, you owe the horse a drink. The aforementioned babugeri (also known as kukeri) assemble—dancing, often clanging bells—to scare away evil spirits.
These rituals might seem removed from contemporary life, but why do approximately seventy thousand people attend Burning Man every year? Why does Santa Fe, New Mexico, hold an annual Zozobra festival “where Old Man Gloom is set ablaze, carrying with it the collective worries, negative thoughts, and energies of thousands?”
There seems to be a powerful appetite for opportunities for people to inhabit different characters. To play. And to participate, in community, in symbolic action.
While the average person may not have access to festivals and rituals like this, there is one “place” we can access from anywhere: the page. Poems can function as ritual spaces. They set the scene, the parameters, the context. Within the poem space, the masked speaker revels in, conjures, or wards off certain energies and entities.
Readers, we’re at the edge of the circle, witnessing, and hoping to be changed in that witnessing. Poem: give us grace, levity, catharsis.
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Cosmic Tantrum by Sarah Lyn Rogers is available via Curbstone Books.
