TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown. 

You’ve probably heard the adage, “Write what you know.” I remember, as a young writer, feeling limited by that. I remember thinking, as someone who grew up in the suburbs of Central Ohio, “But nothing interesting has happened to me!” Nothing about my life seemed worthy to write about.

One of the things I’ve done to combat that feeling is to revise the advice. “Write what you know” is fine, and sometimes it’s just what the piece of writing calls for. But most of the time, I prefer “Write what you can imagine.” The assignment is to think bigger and wider. To think beyond your own experience. If you think about it, your imagination actually knows quite a bit.

And however much you write from your own experience, the speaker of the poem is a creation. I think we’re accustomed to this idea in fiction. We know that the narrator of a story is not the author herself. But the same goes for poetry! Even if I write, “I walked my dog” in a poem, the reader shouldn’t assume that the “I” is me, Maggie Smith, the poet. The reader shouldn’t even assume that the dog in the poem is Phoebe, my incredibly cute and slightly ornery Boston terrier. No, there’s at least some artistic distance between speaker and poet, even when we know that the experiences and details are semi-autobiographical.

To take the imagination even further, we call the persona to the stage. The word persona is from the Latin for “mask,” and it refers to a character taken on by a writer to speak, or narrate, a poem. When I write a persona poem, I’m writing in first-person from the point of view of someone or something other than myself. My goal is to say something fresh and unexpected, to shed new light. Maybe in the Greek myth, Medusa is deathly afraid of snakes. Maybe Sleeping Beauty is horrified, or just plain disappointed, by the world she finds when she awakes. Maybe the wolf-eating-the-grandmother debacle in “Red Riding Hood” was simply a misunderstanding, and the wolf would like to tell his side of the story.

Today’s poem is a persona poem from the point of view of a Hindu goddess, Sati. The practice of a widow throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre is named after Sati, who, in this poem, gets to speak. I think you’ll be moved by what she has to say.

Sati
by Vandana Khanna

Hindu Goddess for whom the practice of a widow throwing 
herself on her husband’s funeral pyre is named

My heart is no lantern.
No matter what they tell you,
it’s not all marigolds and Ram, Ram
like some Hindu cheerleading chant.

At first, all I wanted was fire:
soot-lined skin, my hair in needles
of light and heat, the tight fist
of lungs like a blazing hive.

Red flame, blue flame—it was all the same.

But then, right before my bones
flared like torchlight, singed fingertips
smoothed to a shine, I thought
of the cool cusp of the moon,

river water soothing my throat,
contracting around me—
a muddy womb. Muck and silt
lining my mouth like a new word

for smoke, for freedom.

Instead I have cinder, all this 
useless ash cupped into 
the curve of my body, sitting 
on my skin for an eternity.

"Sati" by Vandana Khanna. Used by permission of the poet.