Elephant Prints or Why Poets Use Persona, or Should

Poetic Consciousness Marked by the Use of Persona

by Richard J. Hilber

Is the use of persona in poetry an essential marker of the development of a poetic consciousness?   No, but only because the evolution of a writer as a poet may lead to a different answer.  For the sake of naivete in us all, lets consider the possibility that it is an essential marker.   I have and here is what I would share with you on my personal determination that it is so.

Poetry just is. One likes to think that one knows it when we he hear it (or read it).  As noted by others before me, most appraisals of what makes mere verse transcend itself are themselves poetic expressions (again as noted already by almost everyone who cares to define the transition to poetry). Emily Dickinson for one in her attempt at definition of the challenge provided her own reader’s requirement of the experience of a poem:

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?"

Our hopes for self discipline in composing free verse and traditional metrics have this in common:  a poem ideally discloses its own argument that its form and language are elevated from the plane of prose to the plateau of poetry (or maybe the mountaintop or the bottom of the sea, if we catch the drift of Dickinson’s measure of a successful poem).

I intend here to speak of two aspects of the measure of success of language as poetry. The first is the perception by the schooled listener or reader that the writer of the verse may have obtained a level of consciousness that can be termed poetic consciousness (not a variation of punch drunk). The second would be a means, possibly thee means, to succeed in creating this perception which concerns us directly as writers of poetry or would be writers of poetry. Please do not deluge me with protests that the general audience for poetry has the slightest idea of what I just said. You’d probably be right.

But you would be wrong in terms of the perception. Poetry stirs. Audiences do not have to understand the poetic consciousness concept to know they are hearing poetry. It is those who would be writers of poetry who are evolving into poets who should care and care deeply. Raise your hand if you want the poems you write to stir your audience.  We all want our poems like Lincoln's Gettyburg Address at a minimum to stir as it stirred the one person present who could hear every word the President spoke, Edward Everett who proceeded Lincoln as the main orator of the commemoration: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes."

However, if we are to provide for our evolution or process of becoming poets, we have to deal with the writers, who having created poetry, can be be said to have developed a poetic consciousness.

We are never shocked to find poetry in prose genres such as the essay, novel or the short story, or even history and biography. Which is not to say writers maintained the poetic consciousness of artifice and language when all that was required was direct communication of meaning. We know that a John Steinbeck or a Herman Melville can write hundreds of lines necessary to the narrative without stirring us to the degree a single passage does.

Those of us who care deeply about our artifice of course consider such lapses into prosaic language as undesired in our genre. Poetry that lapses into verse on occasion however is typical of long poems in the English language. The shorter the poem the more likely it is that the poet sustains the artifice, the thing itself as complete unto itself. The cynosure or gold standard in poetry is verse after verse that exemplifies the heightened use of language which is poetry.

Poets are human, some disgustingly human. When we speak of the poetic consciousness, lets not confuse it with transcending the human condition. That’s a different discussion, one I give the title “Poet's Journey from the Beautiful to the Ethical” (published to this blog on March 16, 2010).  What we must expect of ourselves though is the distinction of devotion to our art, to the craft or artifice of poetry. We need to be passionate about our craft or the product, the poetry, is just more flotsam and jetsum on the oceans of ink churned out by publication.

Speaking of passion, I care not for a person’s politics or religion when I speak of our art. I wholly expect a person’s politics or religion will have a profound effect on his writing. On the other hand, I care for a writer’s poetic consciousness almost as much as I care for poetry itself. Afterall, the source of the poetry, the fertile ground for the flower, is the poet’s mind, his or her imagination. I may wish for the sake of a poet’s family and loved ones that she or he was more successful as a human being, but I will not descry the poetry for the irascibility of the poet who composed it.

I am more enamored with the trait of being inscrutable in a poet. Do we not wholly expect a poet when asked to comment on his poetry to be inscrutable? Afterall, the poem has to speak for itself. Those would be interviewers of poetry take note: you’d do a whole lot better to interrogate the poet on his or her art, process of composition, and artistic consciousness, than to ask a poet what the poem means. Just do not be surprised if the poet is just as inscrutable about his or her poetic consciousness as about what the poem means.

I personally may not like poems to be inscrutable but there are some highly successful poems and thinkers who are inscrutable for the reader or listener.  By this I mean what is meant when the plane of a poem suggests depth beneath it, or maybe even much greater depth.  The power here is in things not said, but poignantly present, supported by externalities, but not the thing or idea itself.  This is the vague idea of metaphor that the poet while speaking of something is actually in indirection forcing the reader or listener to deal with the object of the comparison (which may be hinted at but better left unsaid - the poet trusting on the reader/listener's intuitive leaps of the imagination).  This emphasis on indirection in this presentation will crescendo a bit later when I treat directly of the poet's voice which ideally is only heard behind the facade of the poem itself.

So I proceed to lay out for you than my view of what provides for the evolution of the poetic consciousness beyond the mechanics of metaphorical language.

First, separate process from goals, efforts from results, and be watchful of when you have succeeded in merging the goal with the result. Some writers just do not know when to quit. As a carpenters helper, I was told time and again by the foreman to stop pounding the nail when it became flush with the surface of the wood. He did not believe in packing wood, a result he called elephant prints.

Second, if you bother to think about goals as a writer, consider including a basic protestant, utilitarian goal, consider being of service to others. If one more poem is to be unleashed on the world, make sure it provides value, that it does what poetry potentially can do, stir people out of lethargy and conformity and into life.  I for one do not expect or think or believe that all poets have such a missionary's passion for the effect of our poems on our readers.  But I hold that all language that aspires to the heightened use of language can be characterized as enervating and inspiring and insightful (therefore useful spiritually and holistically to a reader or listener).

Third, write what is true to and for yourself.  I have to believe that Edgar Allan Poe was never more himself than when he was writing the poems he had in him to write. It should never be about writing for publication. I am reminded of the Writer’s Digest articles that recommend we study the poems accepted for publication. Geez!  I hope we remember that advice had to do with where we send our poems to be published, not that we would write the kind of poem that would be accepted for a particular publication (although that's perhaps an important activity for breaking into the realm of published poets).

A really good editor once told me that if its published don’t take it personal; if it’s not published, don’t take it personal. Write to suit yourself and you will be on your way to a poetic consciousness. Write what you know and out of your experience and you will not be wide of the mark.

Fourth, let your point of view be known to you alone, let it inform the decisions that go into writing, the style choices and the word choices, but do not tell us directly what that point of view is in any language meant to be poetic. Some say write down what your point of view is and then throw it in the waste paper basket. If you are enamored of such compositions, then write letters to the editor.

Fifth, take control. Do not confuse inspiration with perspiration. Make conscious decisions about what you are creating. Word choice, rhyme, rhythm, humorous, serious, et cetera. Some of you in the audience are saying that “poetry just happens.” I argue that that is so only because the work is done and the transcription is what seemed like no work at all. Some poems really do just write themselves, but let the first critic then be the person who lays claim to having authored the poem. Try using the pen name “Anonymous” if you are failing to take responsibility for the inherent decisions which go into automatic writing.

Lastly, any or all of the above rules are made to be broken, our craft demands it of us sooner or later. In this, I know my view today of my topic is unlikely my view of my art as I should evolve and I doubt very much I care a fig about "the hobgloblin of consistency" to give Emerson his due.  I do suspect that one day you as my audience if not already would take issue with any or all of my five points. 

Well then, with all that advice, we’re set. Let’s take a breather.When we come back, we will put you on the couch and see if we can parse your psyche.

Let’s say that you took all five pieces of advice. You are set, right? Well hardly. The piece that is missing is not really advice. It’s more about knowing you are sitting in the right room of the palace instead of some closet. If you have a poetic consciousness, then it helps to know you have it.

The number one way to know is your humility. Inspite of all the sweat and perseverance, you ultimately either have, or must, let go of your poem. Afterall, for the artificer, it is the success of the product (that is the thing itself we have undertaken). A poet can be no damn good to herself by taking the truth - the objective reality of her verse’s success as poetry - personally. Celebrate the success, but do not let it go to your head. You found your way out of a closet, but you may still be in the ante-room. You know there is even a greater room in the palace. And the personal honesty thing too. You have to know when a poem fails. That’s opportunity knocking. That’s why they say to spend time reading even mediocre poets as reminders of what we do not like in our own poetry.

Now, I see we have time to turn to my second point for the evening. The second would be the means to succeed in creating this perception that our poem stirs the audience, which concerns us directly as writers of poetry or would be writers of poetry. Let’s say that the very advice for developing a poetic consciousness (where and when in fact the advice is taken) will result in creating the perception by the audience that our poetry is stirring. Well I’m sorry. If you want a formula for success, that lecture is next door, in a course called “How to write poetry.” No, no, no! We are going to stick to our topic. We are going to talk about the mature versus the immature poetic consciousness. We are going to talk about persona, the use of personae in poetry.

On the elemental level, the use of persona in poetry is a bridge to fictionalizing our verse.  Whose afraid of that?   Good, no one. After all, we have all grown quite accustomed to truth stranger than fiction and more truth in the fiction than in the cold hard facts. 
The principal is that verse can never succeed as poetry if it is not in fact separate from its creator, the writer. That invites, or leaves the door open, to the advantage or short cut in using various voices or persona as the speaker of the words of poetry. It creates opportunities, not the least of which are dramatic and situational irony.  What we do not want as poets is to give fodder for a critical assessment that the only person in the audience who doesn't get the irony of the poem is the poet who crafted it!  So the mere sophistication of poetry occurs when the writer adopts a persona deliberately.  The use of a mask always reminds us that art is the approximation of reality and a metaphor for it, but not real, really experienced, but still not the same as reality itself.

So let say that you as a writer or would be writer of poetry made a command decision: you insisted on using one voice and one voice only, to the exclusion of all other voices. You did this to be true to yourself. You took my advice didn’t you? God bless you for that. You risk putting yourself on view for your audience. You held yourself up to potential ridicule. You risked boring the audience. The audience was stirred. Stirred to get up and leave! The one sin is to to take yourself seriously when in the public eye. Now Emily Dickinson for the most part just stayed out of the public eye.  However, each of her poems eventually (like any poem which sees the light of day) had to succeed on its own merits. Hopefully, some exegete has determined how many separate personae Emily used.

Obviously, I have left a very upset poet twisting in the wind here. Such a poet who insists on one persona, himself or herself, may conclude that so much self revelation was not worth the ridicule. So a false self that will succeed with the audience becomes the object of our daydreams. Well, that’s a step in the right direction. It becomes thee step in the right direction when the persona selected is the right persona for a particular poem. It simply becomes another decision, like word choice.

So if you want to demonstrate maturity in your poetic consciousness, do intentionally choose the voices, the personae, in your poems. Give stream of consciousness, thought, dream, and speech to your personae who by the miracle of language come to stand for a particular point of view (not necessarily your own). You will have more fun writing poetry and it will be easier for you to stand back from your poetry as  the poem’s first audience. It if doesn’t’ stir you, what makes you think it will stir an audience in a public reading of your poetry. Emily was right, you know. You are your first, most important, audience.  She was long dead and gone when her poems proved up to her readers what she already knew!

Richard J. Hilber.  Saturday, March 17, 2012.

Note. Poet Michael Ryan in an article entitled “My Favorite Poet: Emily Dickinson” among other commentators have already identified Dickinson’s critical statement and its source: “There is no information in Emily Dickinson's poems that separates her from us. She works the seams of language through her mastery of rhetoric and poetic form. She extracts from words "amazing sense." Instead of merely referring to the experience of the writer, the poem is made to be an experience for the reader, which is precisely how she says she knows poetry in her famous remark to [Thomas Wentworth] Higginson: ‘If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way…’" Ryan quote was originally published in the Emily Dickinson Journal. Available as used here on line at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19269.




Thank you, and good night.

Say what you mean; mean what you say.

So when a character walks up to a lady friend and he calls her a tramp, she slaps him, real hard, which is exactly to the point.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the guy is gangsta and the lady is a moll.   He meant what he said, and she believed him.  Clarity but no drama.  Sometimes we just needs a little context for us to get it right.  The rest of the story is the guy has learned prior to this slap that she is not a tramp, but a real lady and not one he wants to be in a relationship with, not just yet.  He needs to finish a few scores before he goes legit!


First, don’t mince words, be concise. Use as few words as possible to say exactly what you mean, just as Professor Strunk advises every would be stylist. Second, mean what you say. Now, we have to entertain the problematical ambiguity of these words.

I believe it is for the reader/listener to determine if the speaker is actually credible, means what he says. For example, I tell my sweetheart that “I love her.” She of course can say, “Do you mean that?” Or she could say, “What do you mean by love?” The one thing she is not going to say is, “I love you, too,” unless of course she means it, or maybe she was just trying to get past an embarrassing moment, in which case she didn’t mean it. Now if I really want to be heard, well then I have to ante up. “Will you marry me?” Now she can play dumb and ask if I think she is some kinda fortune teller, or she will answer the direct question. Either way, I am way ahead of telling her that I love her.  Or am I?

One is reminded of the Mad Hatter and Alice and the riddle of the raven and the writing desk, “Why is the raven like a writing-desk?” Lewis Carroll said he never had an answer in mind for the riddle when he wrote his fantasy.  Pundits eventually came up with the answer.   "Edgar Allan Poe, because he  his poem 'The Raven' was his favorite poem and one which he had written on his favorite writing-desk." 

Now, back to the Mad Hatter.  For purposes of a criticism of Alice, the Hatter pursues her glee at having a riddle to solve.  For when Alice said she’d "guess," he said, "Do you mean “answer” the riddle?" She says yes. He would have everyone say what they mean then (in this case answer the riddle, not guess at the riddle). Alice retorts that she believes she means what she said.  I for one see splitting hairs, but let’s digress.

I think a writer says what the writer means to say and not something else unless she is putting words into the mouth of a narrator or a character, which invites a second level of assessment by reader/audience: do we or should we believe the words of the narrator/character.  The relationship between the writer and the audience is essentially in play and verbal irony is introduced into the situational irony that provides us with entertainment.  By the way, if in your relationship one or more of the the ladies, and you like verbal irony, you are not necessarily going to be spared, ya smart alek.

Richard J. Hilber. Saturday, March 17, 2012.

An excerpt from Chapter VII. A Mad Tea Party from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is available online.  See Millennium Fulcrum Edition 2.7a. © 1991 Duncan Research with this link  https://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/wonder/ch1.html.