Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “Petroglyphs” and discuss persona poems.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique.
In today’s episode, you’ll hear “Petroglyphs” from my book Noctis Terrores, and we’ll talk about authentic persona poems. Here’s..
Petroglyphs
Red River Canyon, New Mexico
I.
To keep good land is all that matters.
The creek hums in the irrigation ditch.
Beans and corn hold hands and twirl.
What do you know of moonlight, how it gathers
the white clouds of your breath into itself?
II.
Elk hooves pressed into clean mud make a trail
of tiny hearts. Every time an arrow leaves
the string, I sigh. I know what it costs to live here.
The old women’s chins tremble when they sing.
III.
With the rattle, with the prayer dance,
we call the herds down from the high aspens.
I slip an elk hide over my shoulders,
press shed antlers to my skull.
Suddenly I remember what water tastes like,
the ears of green corn scattered in the fields.
IV.
In the morning, I wear a coat of clouds.
I walk the trail my grandfather cut to water.
Boulders are always washing their hands.
My daughter’s tiny fingers curl in mine,
tendrils of summer squash.
There is not enough time
to love this Earth.
Discuss:
Confessional poems have become so popular in the last 60 or 70 years that we tend to automatically assume the speaker of any given poem is the same person as the poet, that the I of the poem is in fact the poet speaking to us.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In a persona poem like this one, we’ve got a created or imagined character. It could be a historical character, a character from literature that you’re making your own, or just somebody that you make up. You imagine your way into another life.
You can create an authentic persona through your lived experiences, time spent with someone else who is other to you, through research, empathy, or some combination. But you have to get it right. It can’t be stereotypes. Your persona, your character, has to feel alive. So here, I’m drawing from a mix of personal experience and empathy.
You may not be surprised to realize that I am not a native guy living like a thousand years ago in a river canyon. But I do have outdoor living and childhood memories that are helping me get into his skin. There are some places where all of our human experiences come together, right? From different starting points we reach some common middle ground, and I can do that here through things I’ve lived through that are similar to his.
So let me show you where I’m drawing from my own life to pull this one off. The first section ends with, “What do you know of moonlight, how it gathers the white clouds of your breath into itself?” I spent about a year in my late 30s living in a teepee on Signal Mountain outside of Chattanooga, and I had no lights and no running water, just a wood stove and three coats usually at night to keep me warm.
So I remember that in my little circle of hardwoods on the ridge, somewhere in the low 40s is when my breath would begin to turn white. And that sensory experience of seeing my own breath under the moonlight stays with me, and it’s one that’s pretty timeless. Our speaker would know it, too.
Section 2 has several things drawn from my childhood or my youth. First, we have, “Elk hooves pressed into clean mud make a trail of tiny hearts.” If you grew up reading deer tracks in the woods like I did in middle Tennessee, you know that they look exactly like hearts. And elk are the same way. The hooves are generally in the shape of a heart when they get pressed into mud or into dirt. And it’s a kind of weird juxtaposition, I imagine, to follow a bunch of hearts toward a kill.
The next personal connection is, ‘“Every time an arrow leaves the string, I sigh.” I’ve never bow hunted, but I did come home from church one Sunday when I was about eight or nine and shot dead a chipmunk that was rooting around in my mother’s flowerbeds, and I remember staring at its lifeless body and realizing what I’d done, that that single pull of a trigger had ended this living thing. That shock of mortality, I think, is pretty common for boys who grow up playing in the woods. We learn through transgressing that our life comes at a price.
Section 2 then says, “The old women’s chins tremble when they sing.” I grew up in a choir in a little Baptist church, making up our harmonies from scratch, and I remember seeing the old people’s chins wobble when they would sing. Old people are old people just about everywhere you go, so this is something that our speaker in historical New Mexico might have known as well.
In Section 3, we have, “With the rattle, with the prayer dance, we call the herds down from the high aspens. I slip an elk hide over my shoulders, press shed antlers to my skull. Suddenly I remember what water tastes like, the ears of green corn scattered in the fields.” I’ve studied cross cultural shamanism for about 20 years now, and one of the key experiences that really hit home for me was the animal dance, imagining yourself becoming the animal as you move. There’s this shift in mindset where you see the world fresh, and that’s what I want to happen here in these lines.
In Section 4, our speaker says, “I walk the trail my grandfather cut to water.” Now, I don’t know that I ever walked a trail my granddaddy had cut to the creek or to the river, although I definitely walked on some trails my parents had cut in our backyard. But my granddad was a builder, and he built or renovated the houses that my father grew up in, the house that I grew up in, the house he died in, and the church where I got saved a few times just to make sure it stuck.
We’d drive around town in his truck, and he’d point out the houses that he had built. So I don’t know exactly what my speaker experiences here as he walks to water, but I know what it’s like to follow the footsteps that my grandfather has left around town, this place where the personal and family history becomes geographical, our speaker’s tender connection with his place.
In all these examples, I’m taking my lived experiences and I’m uprooting them and setting them down into this river canyon, and they fit. I’m looking for similarities between my life and his, sometimes in sensory details like tracking animals, and sometimes in those bigger picture things that all humans actually share, like perhaps the experience of watching people we love get older or living in the footsteps of our family.
What I’m not doing is making my ancient native guy some enlightened being who’s at one with the Earth. I’m not putting my environmental message in his mouth and making him preach to my modern, probably urban, probably mostly white audience. He’s just this guy living in a little town by the river who loves this place, and that’s something we can all achieve in our own way.
Let’s hear “Petroglyphs” one more time, and listen for the places where your own lived experiences meet up with our speaker’s lived experiences, and you can enter into his skin through empathy. Here’s “Petroglyphs,” from the Red River Canyon of New Mexico.
Petroglyphs
Red River Canyon, New Mexico
I.
To keep good land is all that matters.
The creek hums in the irrigation ditch.
Beans and corn hold hands and twirl.
What do you know of moonlight, how it gathers
the white clouds of your breath into itself?
II.
Elk hooves pressed into clean mud make a trail
of tiny hearts. Every time an arrow leaves
the string, I sigh. I know what it costs to live here.
The old women’s chins tremble when they sing.
III.
With the rattle, with the prayer dance,
we call the herds down from the high aspens.
I slip an elk hide over my shoulders,
press shed antlers to my skull.
Suddenly I remember what water tastes like,
the ears of green corn scattered in the fields.
IV.
In the morning, I wear a coat of clouds.
I walk the trail my grandfather cut to water.
Boulders are always washing their hands.
My daughter’s tiny fingers curl in mine,
tendrils of summer squash.
There is not enough time
to love this Earth.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, write a persona poem. Steer clear of stereotypes and use one or more of these options to create an authentic persona. You can use:
- lived experiences
- time spent with someone or something who is “other” to you
- research
- empathy
- some combination of these
- or something else
Outro
Thanks for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with me, Stephen Cavitt. You’ve been listening to “Petroglyphs” from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major booksellers, and the link’s in the episode description. I’d so appreciate it if you picked up a copy.
See you next week!