Identity for me is a tricky thing in poetry. So often we assume that the identity of a narrator is the poet themselves and often we can find evidence to that fact but identity in poetry is tricky and isn’t always as confessional as we might think. The great thing about poetry is that you can embody the voice of anyone and therefore take on an identity. What I found really interesting about the work for this week is that while each of the poem spoke to a personal identity it also spoke to larger identities as well.
Alone by Maya Angelou is the story of a person’s personal struggle with Lonliness but Angelou doesn’t just make it personal she adds a refrain which makes the poem connectable for more people:
“nobody,
but nobody
can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.”
While the first stanza is personal and close, Angelou begins to identify others who suffer from loneliness. She creates intersections between people as opposed to separating them by making it too personal or limiting her connection to a specific group. She could have made the choice to make the poem extremely personal but instead she uses the idea of loneliness to bring people together, as though not wanting to be alone is really what connects us all.
In comparison, Marian Haddad’s poem I have no history here feels as though it’s limiting the connection between people. She builds this place that separatist in our minds, “ where people seem distant/ and unhearing.” but this poem feels as though it is about creating space in an unfamiliar place. Haddad uses form to show the disconnect between the people who are coming to America:
“ are we not all welcome
in this salty land by the sea
out my window the sea
no longer the night nearing
a few lights yellow
and white between the hills”
The poem begins to come further and further apart to show the feeling of loneliness and discrimination felt in this country. It is a struggle to feel connected to this new home. But then Haddad pulls it back. Making the choice to feel connected, forcing space to be made for her words. Then in her final to lines she takes the next step “my southwest skin/has scaled off/dropping quietly/into the grass” by leaving her skin in the land she forces a connection. Just like so many other people has bleed, sweat and shed skin in this land and make it her own so does she. Her title indicates that she has no history here but in this last moment, she begins to make memories. It almost acts as a manual to others, create your history in lost flesh, whatever that means for you.
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thanks for this post, eboni.
ReplyDeletei think it's really important to think about these things, as poets often do take great freedom in assuming other identities under the guise (or excuse, as it may be) of "poetic license."
the issue of authenticity & responsibility comes up immediately for me. where is the line & who decides where it's drawn. there are certain topics that are off-limits for particular groups of people & vice versa.
what does it do the reading, though? why do we assume that poetry is truth? that poetry is not fictional? what does that say about the form, in that it has become much more then a form?
big questions you bring up here. whoo.
now see, that's what i am always saying. everyone assumes poetry is memoir in short lines and often it is but sometimes it takes on a persona. Can we buy into fictional poetry, does it lose its authenticity
ReplyDeletee
I think too there is a difference between memoir / confessional poetry and being honest in ones work. You can still have a POV or voice that is distanced from the poet and still reveal places of connection, dissonance and gravity with the idea/identity/character that holds a kind of authenticity. For example, I could write poems from the POV or voice of someone in my family, or from the perspective of a landscape or by using state found language and then the way I choose to craft a piece, what I reveal & how I do it will/ does / should? show the connection or relevance between me as poet to the voice in the poem. So that what keeps the work from being appropriative or solely concerned with being clever is that in its approach and path whether fictional or memoir the poet reveals his/her intentionality and relationship to the work. It's interesting too that perhaps some of the differences between 'fictional' poetry and fictional prose is intimacy. Poems are often very intimate and can circle a singular image, place, time, experience with a certain suspension of disbelief not easily given to prose. Poetry drops the questions without providing an answer. Prose often is pushed to have an answer, a circular ending, a predetermined track.
ReplyDeleteEboni, I love the fact that you started your conversation with "identity is a tricky thing" -- I'm right there with you on that. I can't tell you how many times I have read a poem and wondered if the poet was confessing or exposing someone else. Either way, if the poem is well-written, it doesn't usually matter -- just makes me more curious.
ReplyDeleteI feel like identity is this thing that we really can't define globally -- we can each have our own personal definitions and some of us can even agree to the same definition -- thus creating a group definition, but the bottom line is that identity is individual.