Persona Poetry Class

The last time I posted I hadn't yet had my first persona poetry class with Camille Dungy. Four weeks later I've now had the class three times (it's on Mondays so no class on Labor Day) and wanted to share with everyone what the experience has been like so far.

In a word: amazing!

In more words: challenging, thought-provoking, paradigm-shifting, and at times teeth-gnashingly difficult...

Ok, enough with the adjectives, let's get to the concrete details.

In Professor Dungy's persona class we read approximately one poetry book per week (between holidays and furlough days we miss four class and for some of the 'hard' books we get an extra week). Each week when we have a book due, in addition to coming to class ready to discuss the books, we bring a persona poem written in response to the book and a one page single spaced essay on what techniques of the poet we just read we utilized in our response poem.

I love the homework format. I'm learning so much more about poetry techniques from this class than I've learned from literature classes in the past because as much as I love discussing the themes of a work or its tone and metaphors, in lit classes you often don't get down to the nitty gritty of how a poet is making you react the way you do to their work. To do the homework in this class, not only do you have to think about what the poet's doing and how they're doing it, but you have to do it yourself and then put into words what you just did. I really feel like I'm communing with the poets I'm reading, getting at their writing processes, and constructing hypotheses on why they've made the choices they've made. I've never felt this close to a poet whose work I'd just met a week before. It's uncanny how much craft information I'm internalizing and I feel like it's already having a tangible effect on my ability to view the choices I make in my own work more objectively.

Here's our reading list for the semester:

The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck
What Was Lost by Herbert Morris
Cooling Board by Mitchell Douglass
Winners Have Yet to Be Announced by Ed Pavlic
Zong by NourbeSe Philip
Dance, Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong
Master Letters by Lucie Brock-Broido
MacNolia by Van Jordan

The hard part about each week's assignment is figuring out how to respond to the poet without trying to imitate them. To be honest on the first book, Wild Iris I wasn't sure how else to respond. Some part of me needed to write a poem that Louise Gluck could have written, and when I got the poem back Camille said I'd done a really good job of writing a Gluck poem. Then we read Herbert Morris who writes epic poems with a level of historical knowledge I don't possess and can't pretend to. I confessed to Camille that I'd been unable to imitate the poet and she told me it was not required, that she just wanted us to think about the poet's techniques and let some aspect of their writing be a jumping off point for our own experimentation. For Cooling Board I want to write a poem in my own voice with a twist rather than a poem that doesn't quite manage to be a Mitchell Douglass poem. I guess it's hard because I get so perfectionistic about the assignments and tell myself that sounding less like the author is lazy in some way, too easy. But I think I'll actually get more out of the class (not that I'm not already getting a lot out of it) if I can take off my literary figure kabuki masks. It's kind of ironic that I think of it in that way since the word persona was apparently derived from the Greek word for mask.