I've begun editing the poems of a book-length manuscript in the past week or so and one of the editing choices I'm faced with is the use of pronouns. As I establish voice and persona in a poem, I must decide whether to write in the first person singular or plural, or second person or third. I must decide whether to deploy pronouns at all, or just name the thing. The pronoun(s) I choose or decline determine the tone of the poem I'm trying to write, in a big way.
Third person pronouns tend to push poems toward narrative. In search of third-person narrative material, I pulled poems from my book shelf at random and came up with "The Second Sleep," the first poem in a sequence by James Dickey titled "Fathers and Sons":
Curled, too much curled, he was sleeping
In a chair too small for him, a restless chair
That held no place for his arms;
In his sleep he grew legs to replace them
As his father liftingly strained
And carried him into the next room.
All the time he settled away
A gentle man looked upon him
And then walked out of the house
And started his evergreen car.
Terrific impact, none his,
Killed him three blocks to the north.
In his second sleep the boy heard
The reared-up tearing of metal
Where a glassed-in face leapt and broke,
But to him it was something else,
An animal clash, a shock of resolving antlers,
And slept on, deeper and deeper
Into the mating season.
The next room filled with women; his nostrils
Flared, his eyes grew wide
And shot with blood under eyelids.
Brow lowered in strife, he stamped
In the laurel thicket, a herd of does
Trembling around him. Into the rhododendron
His rival faded like rain.
He stared around wildly, head down.
In the undying green, they woke him.
Well, this choice wasn't totally random. James Dickey always supplies, if it's narrative verse you're after. The thing about the poem's third person narration is how completely it wipes out any hint of authorial voice or possible autobiography. (This is not to say there's no authorial voice in this poem; stories must have storytellers, after all.) It's possible--I don't know Dickey's biography--the story is deeply personal, that the poet recalls his own experience and feeling in the poem. But the effect of the repeated use of "he," "him" and "his" is to bury the authorial and the personal.
There's another abiding effect from the drumbeat of third person singular pronouns in this poem: reinforcement of the poem's title and theme, "Fathers and Sons." This narrative could be about any father and son. The details may vary, but the sense of a fragile closeness lost so readily to chance events (chance in this sense standing in for fate) applies to any father-son relationship. The idea that the father-son bond is broken while the boy sleeps invites Freud, not to mention one of the more universal storytelling themes: bad things happen in absence. The third person singular not only keeps Dickey out of it, but lets you and me into the experience at some safe distance.
Writing in the second person you, either plural or singular, can render a poem intimate or public. The singular you lets me address a lover, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a co-worker, an enemy, a mentor, a mentee, a boss, a pet, a car, even my own left hand. It permits me to address you, the reader, as if I know you. You, that is, lets me personify and explore an intimate connection. You deployed as a plural lets me get on a soap box and preach or harangue to entire communities. It makes it possible for me to point fingers (j'accuse!) at Boomers and Gen-Xers and the banking class and car salesmen. Mainly, this plural you sets me apart from the audience of the poem I am writing, or at least from the dramatis personae of the poem. I don't have to feel what you feel(s) or think what you think(s) or experience what you experience(s). I can stand in my pulpit and address you en masse.
Then of course there is the generalized you, stand-in for the equally impersonal "one." This you enables me to pontificate, moralize, share an insight, speak wisely and even ironically in the same way that we does, without my having to soil myself with "us-ness." This you also lets you dissociate yourself in the same way, if you don't care for the particular wisdom being dispensed through my poem. The sentence you just read deploys you in exactly the way it describes the strategy. It lets you say, but I am me, singular me, and so not a part of this you. Added benefit: you is thoroughly modern and American. Only a Brit or somebody still living in the 19th Century would seriously say (or write) "one does this or that."
We and I, on the other hand, are minefields of tonality, authenticity, and credibility. Not that many writers of poems think so. In fact, any casual survey of what's on the internet or your local bookstore's poetry shelves suggests the opposite. The triumphal I and all-inclusive we are more than de rigeur in contemporary poetry writing; they verge on law. This is so, I suppose, because so many writers of all ages are taught that poetry is self-expression in the sense that its content concerns the person writing it. Every poem I write is about me, what I had for breakfast this morning.
In this I/we universe, poems are personal statements. They "come from the heart." They are "authentic" because they are "true," that is, the sentiments they express are "true." Give me a dollar for every poet who justifies his or her poem with "It's true! It really happened that way!" and you'll make me a rich man. In the special case of we, the voice of we poems assumes for you, the reader, a thought, an opinion, a feeling. It's a sneaky way of projecting my way of feeling onto you, for making you part of my team, for better or worse.
You may be wondering, if you haven't given up reading this entry yet, where I'm going with this besides an end-of-decade rant about the status of contemporary poetry writing. Here is where. Your choice of pronouns when you write a poem says a lot about your literary and emotional agenda. Or it should. If you are one of those poetry writers who shy away from the authorial I, that says something about what you think poetry is, how it functions, its role in society (or at least your community), your own emotional and psychic relation to what you're writing. Repressed, maybe? If you are a writer who uses the first person singular pronoun exclusively, that says something about you as a writer and a person. If you deploy we frequently in your writing, perhaps this means you understand poetry to be a wisdom-dispensing medium, that you have issues with not being listened to in your daily interactions with others, that you're alienated.
Reviewing the 65+ poems in my new manuscript, I find a pretty liberal usage of all these pronouns (except the more antique one). More importantly, I am reminded in every instance of the decision point where one poem came to be dominated by one pronoun form or another. Every instance was just that--a decision about the poem's ultimate point of view, voicing, tone. This tells me that I have tried throughout this manuscript to assemble works of art, not just statements "from the heart," though every one of these poems comes exactly from there, no matter whether my personal voice--The Voice of Clark--is foregrounded or buried. What "from the heart" means in this context is, if you're asking, a desire to make art.
Have I succeeded? One never really knows.
Third person pronouns tend to push poems toward narrative. In search of third-person narrative material, I pulled poems from my book shelf at random and came up with "The Second Sleep," the first poem in a sequence by James Dickey titled "Fathers and Sons":
Curled, too much curled, he was sleeping
In a chair too small for him, a restless chair
That held no place for his arms;
In his sleep he grew legs to replace them
As his father liftingly strained
And carried him into the next room.
All the time he settled away
A gentle man looked upon him
And then walked out of the house
And started his evergreen car.
Terrific impact, none his,
Killed him three blocks to the north.
In his second sleep the boy heard
The reared-up tearing of metal
Where a glassed-in face leapt and broke,
But to him it was something else,
An animal clash, a shock of resolving antlers,
And slept on, deeper and deeper
Into the mating season.
The next room filled with women; his nostrils
Flared, his eyes grew wide
And shot with blood under eyelids.
Brow lowered in strife, he stamped
In the laurel thicket, a herd of does
Trembling around him. Into the rhododendron
His rival faded like rain.
He stared around wildly, head down.
In the undying green, they woke him.
Well, this choice wasn't totally random. James Dickey always supplies, if it's narrative verse you're after. The thing about the poem's third person narration is how completely it wipes out any hint of authorial voice or possible autobiography. (This is not to say there's no authorial voice in this poem; stories must have storytellers, after all.) It's possible--I don't know Dickey's biography--the story is deeply personal, that the poet recalls his own experience and feeling in the poem. But the effect of the repeated use of "he," "him" and "his" is to bury the authorial and the personal.
There's another abiding effect from the drumbeat of third person singular pronouns in this poem: reinforcement of the poem's title and theme, "Fathers and Sons." This narrative could be about any father and son. The details may vary, but the sense of a fragile closeness lost so readily to chance events (chance in this sense standing in for fate) applies to any father-son relationship. The idea that the father-son bond is broken while the boy sleeps invites Freud, not to mention one of the more universal storytelling themes: bad things happen in absence. The third person singular not only keeps Dickey out of it, but lets you and me into the experience at some safe distance.
Writing in the second person you, either plural or singular, can render a poem intimate or public. The singular you lets me address a lover, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a co-worker, an enemy, a mentor, a mentee, a boss, a pet, a car, even my own left hand. It permits me to address you, the reader, as if I know you. You, that is, lets me personify and explore an intimate connection. You deployed as a plural lets me get on a soap box and preach or harangue to entire communities. It makes it possible for me to point fingers (j'accuse!) at Boomers and Gen-Xers and the banking class and car salesmen. Mainly, this plural you sets me apart from the audience of the poem I am writing, or at least from the dramatis personae of the poem. I don't have to feel what you feel(s) or think what you think(s) or experience what you experience(s). I can stand in my pulpit and address you en masse.
Then of course there is the generalized you, stand-in for the equally impersonal "one." This you enables me to pontificate, moralize, share an insight, speak wisely and even ironically in the same way that we does, without my having to soil myself with "us-ness." This you also lets you dissociate yourself in the same way, if you don't care for the particular wisdom being dispensed through my poem. The sentence you just read deploys you in exactly the way it describes the strategy. It lets you say, but I am me, singular me, and so not a part of this you. Added benefit: you is thoroughly modern and American. Only a Brit or somebody still living in the 19th Century would seriously say (or write) "one does this or that."
We and I, on the other hand, are minefields of tonality, authenticity, and credibility. Not that many writers of poems think so. In fact, any casual survey of what's on the internet or your local bookstore's poetry shelves suggests the opposite. The triumphal I and all-inclusive we are more than de rigeur in contemporary poetry writing; they verge on law. This is so, I suppose, because so many writers of all ages are taught that poetry is self-expression in the sense that its content concerns the person writing it. Every poem I write is about me, what I had for breakfast this morning.
In this I/we universe, poems are personal statements. They "come from the heart." They are "authentic" because they are "true," that is, the sentiments they express are "true." Give me a dollar for every poet who justifies his or her poem with "It's true! It really happened that way!" and you'll make me a rich man. In the special case of we, the voice of we poems assumes for you, the reader, a thought, an opinion, a feeling. It's a sneaky way of projecting my way of feeling onto you, for making you part of my team, for better or worse.
You may be wondering, if you haven't given up reading this entry yet, where I'm going with this besides an end-of-decade rant about the status of contemporary poetry writing. Here is where. Your choice of pronouns when you write a poem says a lot about your literary and emotional agenda. Or it should. If you are one of those poetry writers who shy away from the authorial I, that says something about what you think poetry is, how it functions, its role in society (or at least your community), your own emotional and psychic relation to what you're writing. Repressed, maybe? If you are a writer who uses the first person singular pronoun exclusively, that says something about you as a writer and a person. If you deploy we frequently in your writing, perhaps this means you understand poetry to be a wisdom-dispensing medium, that you have issues with not being listened to in your daily interactions with others, that you're alienated.
Reviewing the 65+ poems in my new manuscript, I find a pretty liberal usage of all these pronouns (except the more antique one). More importantly, I am reminded in every instance of the decision point where one poem came to be dominated by one pronoun form or another. Every instance was just that--a decision about the poem's ultimate point of view, voicing, tone. This tells me that I have tried throughout this manuscript to assemble works of art, not just statements "from the heart," though every one of these poems comes exactly from there, no matter whether my personal voice--The Voice of Clark--is foregrounded or buried. What "from the heart" means in this context is, if you're asking, a desire to make art.
Have I succeeded? One never really knows.
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