February 2010 Poetry Challenge

A number of contemporary poets have been writing persona poems from the perspective of individuals from the past. These poems are written in the first person, as if they were written by the historical character him- or herself. The poet gives voice to the character, usually someone who is no longer living. In order to be effective, poets have to do research the biography of the person they select and the time period in which that person lived.

One poet who has been successful in writing persona poems is Jennifer Clement. She has written in the voice of Albert Einstein, as well as Marie Curie. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre pioneered research on radiation. In a series of seven poems, written as letters from Marie to Pierre Curie after his death, Clement express Madame Curie’s grief, and also Marie’s deteriorating condition.

Seven Letters Written to Marie Curie
to Pierre Curie After His Death

Letter I

Kindled by uranium
the great room glowed.
Even from two streets away,
as we walked to the laboratory,
we could see the matter
through the window’s seams.
Inside, your chair and lab coat
grew sheer, green, phosphorescent,
pencils were luminous.
Albino rays appeared
in the decimals of our cells
as we quietly became radioactive.
You said, “polonium, radium,”
and your tongue and teeth were yolk opalescent
as if your speech were lit.
I wrote, “I extracted from the mineral
the radium-bearing barium and this,
in the state of chloride,
I submitted to fractional crystallization,”
and the paper warmed
to 98.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
In that room,
black and white
had left the world.

--Jennifer Clement
New and Selected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2008), pp. 71-72).


Judith Infante’s book, Love: A Suspect Form, has been called a novel in verse form. Infante follows events in the lives of the 12th century philosopher Peter Abelard and his student, Heloise, a story which has fascinated people for centuries. The love that developed between them was forbidden by culture and church (and more specifically, the Pope). After the birth of their son, Astralabe, they were secretly married, but did not live together. Abelard sent Heloise back to the convent where she had grown up. In revenge, Heloise's uncle had Abelard drugged and castrated. Many of Infante’s poems are persona poems, told in the voices of Abelard, Heloise, Astralabe and others. Infante weaves elements of the myth of Atalanta into the story.

Here is an early poem in the sequence, when Heloise has just become Abelard's student. The setting for this poem is Canon Fulbert’s residence, Close of Notre Dame, Paris.

Heloise: Lesson

vellum from a goat’s skin
bound into books

quills and ink on a table
first lesson

at midnight listen
my master climbs the stair

a mother might have taught me
the signs of a snare

who can tutor me now
in the art of breaking free

--Judith Infante
Love: a Suspect Form — Heloise and Abelard (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2008), p. 35.


In his book, Tongue of War: from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the 2009 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, Tony Barnstone's poems represent the viewpoints of people involved in or impacted by World War II, in particular, the Pacific theater. The original impetus for the book was a dinner with Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. One of the poems is from his perspective:

The Pilot’s Tale

In the plane’s glass nose the whole sky
lit up the beautifulest blue
you ever seen, bright blue, but I
did not react when the bomb blew.
Not right away. Then I turned round
and saw the cloud of boiling dust
bubbling upwards from the ground
where I guess Hiroshima must
have been, and felt the silver fillings
electrify my teeth. They sent
the chills all through me, boots to hair.
We wiped ‘em out. And as for killing
the ones they say were innocent—
that’s their tough luck for being there.

--Tony Barnstone
Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry; Kansas City MO: BkMk Press, 2009), p. 80.


Barnstone was not content to view the war only from the viewpoint of U.S. officers. For fifteen years, he read transcripts of oral histories, letters, and books about World War II, and conducted interviews, in order to gather experiences and opinions of soldiers and civilians from both sides. A piece of him wanted to abandon the project – it was painful to read and write about the impact of the atomic bomb on the survivors, the Bataan Death March, cannibalism, and other aspects of the war. But, he says in the introduction to the book,“the voices continued to clamor about what they had seen.”

Here is one of the poems voicing a Japanese perspective, based largely on an oral history with a naval officer, who (after the war) recorded his feelings at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor:

They Could Have Given It to Us

but they kept every drop of oil.
That’s why the need to kill flared up
like hot gas in our blood and boiled
all Buddhist conscience out of us.
Today I am a priest, and still
I use the discipline I learned
at the Academy. To kill
is wrong. I know. But then I burned
for it. Pearl Harbor made me burst
with joy. We needed oil, just that.
We had no choice but to strike first.
A cornered mouse will bite a cat.

--Tony Barnstone

Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry; Kansas City MO: BkMk Press, 2009), p. 27.


Here are some additional books of persona poems which you might find interesting (If you click on the title of a book on this blog, it will take you to amazon.com, where the book can be purchased).

* Six by Eve Wood Persona poems from the perspectives of the six wives of Henry VIII.

* Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (Kentucky Voices) by Eve Wood. Poems from the perspective of York, who played an important role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Enslaved, York asked Clark for his freedom after the expedition.

* Commonwealth of Wings: An Ornithological Biography Based on the Life of John James Audubon (Wesleyan Poetry) by Pamela Alexander. Persona poems fromt he perspective of the most famous of all North American Ornithologists.

* They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems by Quraysh ali Lansana. Persona poems telling the story of Harriet Tubman, who led so many slaves to freedom. Some are in her voice and others are from other perspectives.


The February 2010 Poetry Challenge

The challenge for February is to write a persona poem from the perspective of someone in history. You can pick a pharaoh or slave from ancient Egypt, a monk from the Middle Ages faced with the impact of the plague, an ancient emperor of China or India, a former president or First Lady of the U.S., or . . . . well, you decide!

You may use (or bend) a form (label it as a sonnet, triolet, or whatever), or write in free verse. Poems of 40 or fewer lines have a better chance of being selected. I still have not figured out how to post shaped poems or poems with indents, so it is best to submit a poem with every line starting on the left margin. The winning poem or poems will be posted before the end of February. Sign your poem with your name as you would like it to appear on the blog if you are a winner. Winners retain rights to their own poems. Send your poem to wildamorris [at] Ameritech[dot] net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and . for [dot], and don’t leave any spaces. Or you can access my Facebook page and send the poem in a message. Be sure to give me your e-mail address so I can respond.

Challenge Deadline: February 15, 2010.

© 2010 Wilda Morris

October Challenge: A Contemporary Sonnet

Tony Barnstone begins his essay, “A Manifesto On The Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics,” published in The Cortland Review,* by quoting Ezra Pound, “Make it new.” The sonnet is an old form (or perhaps I should say “forms,” since there are differences between Petrarchan (or Italian), Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets. One major difference is in the rhyme scheme (including whether the sonnet is composed of an octave and a sestet, as in the Petrarchan sonnet, or four quatrains and a couplet as in Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets. Another is the location in the sonnet where the volta or turn takes place.

Possibly as a result of the chaos created by World War I, many poets writing in English forsook formal poetry, including the sonnet, to write mostly free verse. Barnstone believes that the sonnet has a future—if it is modernized. Updating may involve both writing about contemporary subjects and bending some of the rules. In 2005, Barnstone published Sad Jazz: Sonnets. This book begins in the marriage bed and proceeds through separation, divorce and its aftermath, and ends with hope that one can make a new life for him- or herself. Here is a sonnet from Sad Jazz: Sonnets:


Zero at the Bone

And now she takes her chance and blows like wind
out through the door she’s ripped out of his life.
And now his spirit clamps around the wound
and seizes up like flesh around a knife.
And now he feels an anger that could crush
the bones of planets, hates his worried face,
his roll of fat, the strands of hair his brush
picks up from his scalp. And now she’s gone. No force
can fetch her back like Lazarus from death.
She’s in the undiscovered country where
she’s free of him. And now there’s only love
to love, invisible as God, as breath
siphoning from a hole. What’s left of her
for him? An absence in which to believe.

Tony Barnstone
© Tony Barnstone, Used by permission.

Three of the first five lines and two sentences later in the sonnet begin with the words “and now.” This is something I normally would eschew in poetry, but here, it works well. The words “and now” seem to me to serve two functions. First, “and now” announces this sonnet as a continuation of the “plot” of Sad Jazz. More than that, however, the repetition of these words emphasizes the narrator’s feeling that everything (even his own anger) is happening to him, and is beyond his control. He is incapable of stopping the tsunami turning his life upside down.

Another characteristic of the poems is the use of strong images. Because of its subject and language, the poem seems “modern,” even with the biblical reference Lazarus).

Barnstone suggests in his Cortland Review article that, in making the sonnet new, the poet should use rhyme to “open the poem to wildness,” instead of allowing rhyme to make it predictable. English does not have the wealth of rhyme found in French, Spanish or Italian, so the same rhymes have been used over and over through the centuries. In “Zero at the Bone,” Barnstone uses true rhyme (life/knife; crush/brush and death/breath) and slant rhyme (where/her). But he also uses what he calls “full consonance” rhyme, in which the consonants are the same but the vowels are different (wind/wound; face/force; love/lieve [in “believe”]). In Sad Jazz, Barnstone uses a number of other variations which are not “true rhyme.” These forms make the sonnet less predictable, while creating a “poetic” sound.

Another poet whose sonnets are contemporary is Marilyn L. Taylor. The following poem, from Subject to Change, is part of a seven-sonnet cycle, in which the last line of one sonnet morphs into the first line of the following sonnet. The last line of the last sonnet is almost the same as the first line of the first sonnet. The cycle, called “Notes from The Good-Girl Chronicles, 1963,” narrates events from the time “when the friendly skies were full of virgins.”

Celebrity’s Mother

I’ve slapped myself three times across the face,
so I know it’s not a dream, I swear—
my babygirl has really won first place
in the beauty pageant at State Fair.
Look how she slinks on those high heels,
cranks her little hips just like a pro
down that runway—honey, she’s on wheels,
she’s headed for the Johnny Carson show.
Come on, sweetheart, talk a little louder,
bat those lashes, lick your lips a lot;
make your poor old mama even prouder—
grab for what your mama never got.
Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Maidenform!
Just watch my baby take the world by storm.

Marilyn L. Taylor
© Marilyn L. Taylor, Used by permission.


This sonnet is accessible. The subject is modern. The language is conversational—especially “honey,”“babygirl” and “mama”. The reference to Jesus may elicit memory of more classic sonnets, but it's use is contemporary, and is paralleled in an ironic way with the Maidenform bra. References to popular culture (of 1963) abound: “the beauty pageant at State Fair,” “the Johnny Carson show” and “Maidenform.” Taylor sticks to true rhyme in this poem (though she doesn’t always do so), and there is a turn after the second quatrain, but she takes liberties with iambic pentameter (some lines have only eight or nine syllables).

Sonnets which break the traditional rules, as by adding a line, changing the rhyme scheme or abandoning iambic pentameter, come under criticism from purists. But Barnstone and Taylor are not alone in bending the rules. In her book, Nomina (American Poets Continuum), Karen Volkman has a “sonnet” of fourteen iambic lines, but there is only one foot in each line. If one is entering a sonnet contest, some judges would throw such poems out without reading them.

In Nomina, labeled “poems” on the front cover but “sonnets” on the title page, Volkman’s almost seems to be writing in a different genre than Barnstone and Taylor. Despite the fact that Barnstone deals with sadness, anger, even bitterness, most of his sonnets, like Taylor's, are accessible, and have a playfulness about them. Volkman’s are elusive and full of obscurities. Often after reading one of her sonnets, I an unable to say what it is about. There are no titles to provide clues. On the other hand, Volkman’s poems are full of word-play, assonance and alliteration. Volkman is much more likely than Barnstone or Taylor to stick faithfully to iambic rhythm (though not necessarily to pentameter) throughout a poem (Barnstone argues for including some non-iambic feet so the sonnet doesn’t become sing-song). Reading Nomina aloud is a good way to get iambic pentameter into your head. If you enjoy poems for their sound, totally apart from their meaning, you may find Nomina very enjoyable.

CHALLENGE FOR OCTOBER:

For October, write a sonnet which follows most (or all) of the rules of the Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet, but sounds contemporary because of the subject matter, language, etc. Bend a rule or two if you wish, but don't break them - your poem should be recognizable as a sonnet. If you don’t know the traditional rules, borrow a book on poetry from your public library, or Google “sonnet forms.” Read Barnstone’s article for additional ideas, if you wish. Please, no pornography or objectionable language. Submit your poem by October 15 by clicking on “Comments” below. If you are using Foxfire and have trouble posting, try Internet Explorer (or vise versa), or send me a message through my Facebook page. Winner or winners will be posted by the end of October.

Poems posted on blogs are considered published and can be included in your resume.


Notes:
* www.cortlandreview.com/features/06/december/barnstone_e.html


© 2009.