Writing the Persona Poem
Persona poems are poems in the voices of historical or mythological figures or imaginary characters, rather than in a writer’s own voice or an “impersonal” or disembodied “lyric” voice.
The dramatic monologues of Browning and Tennyson, numerous poems by Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, and contemporary poems by everyone from Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell to Ai, Pamela White Hadas, Richard Howard, and Olga Broumas can be classified as persona poems.
This three-hour workshop will be divided into three phases: 1. Exploring the nature and variety of “the persona poem” through a range of examples; 2. Group writing activities, followed by each student attempting a short persona poem; 3. Sharing of the student poems out loud -- aka "giving voice" to the poems’ personae, literally as well as figuratively.