Amy Miller: “Honestly, I hardly ever write in persona anymore. It used to seem like such a great way to break out of the ‘I’ rut, to take the photobombing poet out of the poem and turn the camera outward, which, incidentally, was my mother’s definition of maturity—seeing outside the self. But white writers like myself have always taken that too far, appropriating and fetishizing and diminishing people of other cultures by stepping into their shoes for a moment and pretending to understand their experience. Persona poems are at a crossroads. What viewpoints are we assuming right now that we have no right to assume?” (web)
Sue Fagalde Lick: “These poems are written in my father’s voice, which has been drummed into my head over the years. He’s 96 now, and that voice is fading. Writing as someone else helps me get myself out of the way and hear more clearly what is being said.” (web)
“Fugue: Red Bird Taking Wing” by Lynne KnightPosted by Rattle
Lynne Knight
FUGUE: RED BIRD TAKING WING
after Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s La Femme qui fuit, a novel based on the life of her grandmother, the poet and artist Suzanne Meloche Barbeau (1926–2009)
I. With Abandon
I had to leave. I couldn’t breathe. It had nothing to do
with love for my beautiful babies, Mousse & François.
Nothing at all. It had to do with a disappeared bird,
a red bird I’d painted, a bird taking wing, about to soar.
One day I came home to all but the last of one red wing,
disappeared under my husband’s work.
My bird taking wing, about to soar: painted over by Marcel.
I couldn’t breathe. I had so many words they flew
in my throat like birds trapped in a room. They stayed there for years
until I could no longer breathe. So I had to leave.
I loved my babies, their small feet & hands, their sweet skin,
the way their eyes looked into mine like a mirror,
like a road with no end. But I had to leave.
My red bird was so beautiful, just taking flight,
about to soar, how could anyone do what he did,
what I did, leaving them—not the right questions.
Not the right questions, at all. When people can’t breathe
they do what they must do for air. They undo all the ropes
wrapped around their hearts: they tug & pull until they begin
to gasp. The ropes loosen: they can breathe. So they breathe.
II. My Mother’s Piano and the Manifesto
Night after night she dusted the keys, but otherwise
my mother left the piano untouched. She could play beautifully,
but child after child after child after—what use was music
to her exhausted body except a means to exhaust it more.
Would she have abandoned me and my siblings
if she’d followed her desire? She could have been a concert—
No. No. Useless to think that way. I could have been
a famous poet, a famous painter, but I kept needing
to leave. I was part of the group against all forms
of established order, even the order of words.
But they omitted my work from our manifesto,
the Refus global, so I insisted they remove my name:
no work, no name. I held fast although it meant reprinting
400 copies of the last pages. I held fast years
before when leaving my mother’s house: I stood at her piano,
playing a scale: here’s how you breathe, Mama.
III. Red Nowhere Bird
The woman who fled, my granddaughter called me
yet I wasn’t fleeing: I was seeking. Like the others
in the group, I believed the old words in the old order
needed to be broken. We fractured lines, syntax,
we twisted diction, made words out of new combinations
of letters. We painted against strictures.
Like the others, I lived for art. I wrote poems, I painted,
but I couldn’t breathe: no choice but to leave.
I wasn’t fleeing. I was feeling. Strange, how
close those two words are in English. You see
what happens: I’m in one place, one tongue,
& I seek another. Afraid of roots, of being rooted.
IV. In My End Is My Beginning
There’s no explaining it no matter what order you use
for the words: a mother leaves
her children: rupture: wrench: heartache: cleaving:
& the story is almost lost until her daughter, Mousse,
seeks her mother, & years later Anaïs,
Mousse’s daughter, tells her grandmother’s story: my story:
I, Suzanne Meloche Barbeau, who all her life kept fleeing:
no: seeking, seeking: while the heart
beats on with its story of love and death, its terrible need:
Lynne Knight: “Since reading Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s La Femme qui fuit, I’ve been engrossed in the life of her grandmother, Suzanne Meloche Barbeau, who’s the subject of the novel and who abandoned her babies when they were three and one to pursue her life as a poet and artist. The novel is as closely based on the actual as seems possible, but I finished it wanting more, and after reading more about Meloche Barbeau’s life and watching a film made by her daughter, I started to write in her voice. I write a lot of persona poems, but they don’t always seem like persona poems—people just assume I’m the ‘I’ when the poem is actually based on things women I know have said or done, re-imagined into one voice. The same thing happens with them as happened here with the voice of an actual person: I love the release from the tyranny of the self.” (web)
Maggie Rue Hess: “More often do I imagine other perspectives than try to write out of them. Others tend to guide me in their directions, like Mary Oliver or my old co-workers. What is tied to our deepest sense of self? Is it our daily work? I spent a summer cleaning hotel rooms, and while I enjoyed the job, I didn’t keep it; what I kept was a respect for those who made a career out of providing comfort for strangers.” (web)
Red Hawk: “This poem is part of a longer poem called ‘The Indian Killer.’ This 99-year-old man, a famous former U.S. Army sharpshooter who fought in the Indian wars, speaks to an interviewer in his torn-rag-of-a-voice about his life. He has developed a moral code wrought from suffering and horror, and this poem is one of many which demonstrates this hard-won and rough-cut morality and a deep seated native intelligence.”
Stephen Harvey: “As a formalist, I’ve always been intrigued with Petrarch but can’t quite stomach the mushiness of the Canzoniere which, some critics argue, is written in persona. I borrowed his concept a couple years ago, using Laura as a stand-in for whatever longing I can’t come to terms with. It took a little tinkering, but soon I discovered the voice of a modernized Petrarch bumbling through brothels, the White House, and other disreputable establishments. The hard part now is getting him to shut up.”
Brock Guthrie: “I got the idea for a series of monologues, like this one, from that hideous Trump Access Hollywood tape. Like anybody, I’ve heard people say some troubling things, and over the years I’ve written some of it down. So these grew out of an itch to do something with that material. Readers are used to hearing disturbing voices like these in stories and novels, but rarely do we hear them in poems. That seems unfair. Anyway, I hope I’ve balanced my creative desire to animate this lowlife with a need to understand, tentatively, why he’s like this.” (web)
