NaPoWriMo Day 12: Persona Poetry

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Pluto Shits on the Universe” by Fatimah Asg …

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Let’s do a guided persona exercise/

First: make a list of objects or things that you think go misunderstood. Maybe you feel like nobody appreciates the lowly toaster oven, or perhaps too many people don’t care about, uh, I don’t know, Arbor Day.

You can do people, but I think it’s more fun of you do an object or plant/animal, celestial body, etc. Generate this list for 2-3 minutes.

Second: Take one of the things on your list. Give it a personality, as though it were really a person. What traits would you give it? Is it funny? Sassy? Sad? Angry? What words does it use? What accent? Does it maybe sound like an actor, or someone you know personally? Generate some traits and ideas for 2-3 minutes.

Third: I’m going to give you a couple of short prompts. Respond to these prompts in the VOICE of the character you’ve created (1-2 minutes each):

• What do you want most in this world?

• How do people misunderstand you? 

• How do you want to be perceived?

• Who do you need to hear you? 

We will use your freewrite for a poem in a bit. First, here’s a poem.

Poem: “Pluto Shits on the Universe” by Fatimah Asghar

On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.

Naw.

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.

Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system.
Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t
shit but a day to me. I could spend your
whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking
about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy
on up and marry me by now. Your day?

That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day
is barely the start of my sunset.

My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold
you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.
And you tried to order me. Called me ninth.
Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass
you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your
rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun
I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.

It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more
copper than any sky will ever be. More metal.
Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview,
and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine.

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.
I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids
in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks:
wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.
They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other
planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like
a motherfucker.

It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold:
the freedom of possibility.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.

If you’ve believed that a poem should be sophisticated, this poem certainly dispels you of that notion.

Yes, it’s a vulgar poem—but it’s a poem about voice, a poem that gives Pluto an extremely unexpected persona, and does something entertaining and interesting with it.

This is a persona poem, or a poem from the voice of someone other than the poet. (When we talk about a poem’s voice, we shouldn’t assume that the speaker is the poet themselves. It might be am amplified aspect of the poet’s personality, but to say that the totality of the poet is the speaker of the poem is to restrict poetry’s capacity for truth and meaning. Sometimes poets lie to tell the truth; sometimes, poets inhabit different voices and perspectives.)

What’s great is that, among other things, I can hear the voice of this poem. I feel like I’ve met this Pluto, or at least seen him in a movie. It’s through this voice that the poem is able to amplify certain qualities of Pluto—the repeated line “I chaos like a motherfucker” makes sense in this poem, as does Pluto’s disregard for science and structure, how it resists human order and understanding.

What insight do you think is gained by writing Pluto in this voice? Or is this just a poem written for fun? Regardless, I hope a poem with this amount of vulgarity frees you from trying to write poems that “sound like” poems. There is no singular way to write or think about poetry, so have fun with this prompt.

Prompt

Write a persona poem from the perspective of something that is traditionally unloved or uncelebrated.