Imagine, for a moment, that today you aren’t you. Because today, right now, you must be someone else. You must enter into a voice that is not your own. See the world through their eyes, speaking directly to the reader.
Choose a biographical figure, famous or not, and write a poem from the voice of their unique perspective and predicament. Be careful not to offer your own commentary, and instead explore the inner life of the individual.
To write one, you need to learn a lot about someone’s experience. You must step into their skin and try to understand his or her swirl of emotions and ideas. Detail hunt the senses. It is important to capture and imagine what it was like to see what they saw, hear what they heard, think what they thought, feel what they felt. The language you use must be rich with specifics, both factual and graphic.
If it is helpful, select a pivotal moment in the person’s life and plan to let the poem end there.
Jeanne d’ Arc
May 1431
The men arrived at dusk
with torches to burn the webs from the trees.
The well water had gone bad. And I could smell
the bestial floor as the withered hay began
furiously molting.
And when all the lights had collapsed
with the bruise color of morning, from the next field
the smoke from damp grasses reached me.
It is here I have slept wet-haired on stone.
Some of the women had gone down
into the potato cellars to hide, to breathe
the wet air, to forget the ash that has already
been smeared on their foreheads.
Peasants like rain-worn stones look on, their grief-stunned
faces stare. Early
I had smelled a certain knowledge>
When I heard Your voice the leaves were blowing over
showing their undersides,
the white that so often means rain.
As the priests turn me into fire,
I will say Your name three times.
Then from my breast they will say
they saw a white dove fly.
I am a fir in the gray forest,
farther than my eye can see are the guards that clatter.
I am a fir in the gray forest dreaming
of ash, the ash beyond the common day
aching again to be green as You,
immutable, seen.
– Karen Fish
Pleiku
Their AK-47’s snap off shots like small firecrackers,
Their bullets whiz by like buzzing mosquitoes.
And, over this: The occasional thud of mortar rounds
And the thunderous booms of an RPG hitting home.
The screams of anguish.
The pains of silence.
The lull of night.
The whirring of the Huey blades
Screaming inside my head.
The sounds: morning shells, nighttime bombardments,
The clanging bottles of Jack Daniels.
And the sounds you don’t hear, you could never hear:
The whiz of the round that will injure you.
The whine of the shell that will kill you.
The zip of the body bag closing over your head.
– Amar (Grade 12)
See also:
Don’t write what you know; write who you aren’t.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/70117
