Who Said That?

Voice and persona are related issues: in a poem, who is speaking? Is it the poet? Is the poet speaking as him or her self? That is, is the poem autobiographical?

I leave fiction aside for this post, although the same points apply to fiction and even to much nonfiction.

This topic comes up now because of the poem that opens the October issue of The Ghazal Page "After Persian Ghazals Are Explained to an Arab Poetaster." This poem satirizes two attitudes: the person who dogmatically asserts that the Persian ghazal is the "only" ghazal form and the Arab poetaster (dabbler in verse) who can't believe that attitude yet produces a Persian ghazal to refute it. Ever since I first read this poem, I assumed David Jalajel is speaking as the Arab poetaster, but he tells me that he identifies more with the proponent of the Persian form.

Satire is tough — not so much if the satirist doesn't care what the target of the satire feels. Neither David nor I, though, want to offend anyone who is an advocate of the strict Persian form, nor do we want to start a feud between the two approaches to the ghazal. (That raises the question of how many approaches there are — I hope we see many!)

Ezra Pound was one of the early modern proponents of the persona in poetry, one of his early volumes being titled Personae. The confessional poets (Robert Lowell, John Berryman, others) and the Beats (notably Allen Ginsburg) resisted the domination of the persona idea, that the poet spoke through a mask, a fictional self, rather than as his or her self.

I prefer to invite numerous possibilities: the ghazal is a form fit for both the distanced, more intellectual persona poem, and the more immediate, personal confessional or Beat poem. (Among the many possibilities.)

"Who said that?" Who, indeed?