9780415317856_the_routledge_creative_writing_coursebook

www.ATIBOOK.irPoetry 75poems so far included in this chapter could be described as ‘dramatic’ or ‘narrative’. Thedifference from the other narrative genres is that poetry has is its own metabolism,converting living experience into images, compacting it instead of drawing it out, so thatwe quickly gain a sense of moments as turning points. Narrative image isn’t the onlyeffect poems can achieve. Matthew Sweeney’s poem ‘Tube Ride to Martha’s’ (Sweeney,2002:37), describes some minutes in the life of one man travelling to meet his lover bytube. In the last few seconds ‘as the smoke got thicker and blacker’ he is caught up in anunderground fire. Private lives, public catastrophes, moments when somethingirrevocable happens, or simply when things are not as they were; poetry can recreate suchexperiences, giving them meaning with dramatic impact.PersonaeIn the introduction to his anthology The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, Tom Paulinspeaks of the ‘vernacular imagination’: ‘Many of the voices here are disaffected andpowerless. They know that in the public world polished speech issues orders and receivesdefer-ence. It seeks to flatten out and obliterate all the varieties of spoken English and tosubstitute one accent for all the others’ (Paulin, 1996:262). Polished speech seeks toassimilate the kinds of vernacular Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze and Linton Kwesi Johnston useand keep in use. In each of their poems the speaker is a persona—a character in anarrative telling the story to someone else, or just telling it so that it gets heard. The useof personae allows writers access to a much wider range of experience, but it also, as inthe above examples, enables them to dramatise, and thus preserve, experiences special totheir cultural background. And there will be other advantages. Personae have been sowidely used, especially in the poetry of the past and present century, that the reasons forits persistence might be very interesting to reflect on.You, the writer, are imagining the voice of someone who could be a figure fromhistory or myth, an animal, a stranger, a voice outside any of these categories, the voiceof a member of your own cultural or ethnic group. In verse drama, the characters youinvent will all be personae. The word ‘mask’ is often used to identify the voice style of apersona. Yeats speaks through the madwoman Crazy Jane; Geoffrey Hill speaks throughthe mask of Sebastian Aruruth, Eliot in the voice of Alfred Prufrock. Elizabeth Bishopuses the strayed crab as a persona (see p. 37). The immensely popular Carol Ann Duffy’scollection of poems The World’s Wife has recently made another significant impact withpersonae.Why has it been so useful? Writers often need to feel able to reach beyond their ownpersonal experience. Your life-experience can be relevant to a whole range of culturaland social questions people ask. But if the aim is to widen out, to reach others, explorenew perspectives, and to revive and re-examine old ones, then to write simply as ‘I’—meaning yourself—could at some point become a restriction. Equally, you might chooseto think through some aspect of your own life using a persona. You can become—for theduration—anyone or anything you choose. But there are restrictions here as well. Yourchosen persona—human, object, animate or inanimate—must already carry somemeaning for you and your readers. Even if you choose another real person—your UncleRobbie for instance—then you will need to make him recognisable to your readers orlisteners by making him in some way typical and significant. It is a fundamental fact that