Personal Pronouns

For my memoir class, I was asked to write a reflective piece about how I felt about the memoir writing process and which challenges I faced. The hardest thing for me was using "pronouns" so bluntly, when I was used to hiding them in poetry. I wrote a prosimetrum piece about how I dealt with this. This is the poem I included in the piece. 

The elementary teacher banishes “I” from the essay

At an early age—my thoughts are not

Welcome there. Here, in first prose,

Personal reflection has no home.

New writers equal indoctrinated fear of

Deadly sins in “you” “me” “we” “us” “I.”

 

Kill the reader.

 

Death to the author

Before

she is born.

 

I search for room to beat my wings,

A butterfly trapped between two hands,

Twitching in the darkness. Where will this

Transient lay her head? What country

Will open its doors to this refugee—

Exiled from the essay?

 

The one who calls herself “poem.”

 

Here “I” will hide.

I will hide under a 12-point font

Serif canopy, and branches will obscure

And shadow “my” face.

Though “I” am here, the character

Does not have to be me.

 

Here, the personal pronoun is free.

 

My head rests in the refuge of her floating,

Phantasmagoric form—I am and breathe and do

In sonnets and villanelles, blank verse and free.

 

Now you see, but do not know me.

 

I tell out of order myself in poetry’s syntax—

emotion jumbled.

I conceal love in assonance—

internal rhyme unfurl this heart of mine.  

I speak pain in grinding words tortuous—

banging, audible discord.

I cut my memoires where I will with en—

jambment, how I see it.

 

These are my stories, this is my life:

Elegized, versified, meterized.

You think you know the denizen here—

 that these pronouns

“speak to you.”

I only know these voices

 

And those who live here,

For I am not the only one.

 

There are real people here, beneath these lines

they quiver—life shudder beneath the page

they are safe here too, even from themselves.

I have brought them.

 

Others hide with me in this greenworld,

New pronouns under the canopy. They are

“he” and “it” and “she” and “they.”

 

I hide them in ink and metaphor, obscure words.

They will not be found.

 

They do not know themselves behind simile and symbol,

Allegory and synecdoche.

I put all my feelings about them into

Paradox and irony, understatement or hyperbole.

I will write my reflection in meter and tone,

Burning fire into the page with devotion or despair.

 

Do you see the paper rise and fall with their breath?

 

Of course not. You do not know them.

I hide them well,

 

Until “I” return(s) to the essay.

 

Neighboring “memoir” pulls me back to prose.

She extracts these pronouns from their caches

Like grapes in a wine press--she twists.

 

I must be a different kind of honest.

 

This prose exposes my bones to the world.

My life is before you, you can see it pulsing blue

Beneath my skin—blue and scared,

Scared to let you know it.

Scared to let you know these pronouns

Who must see themselves for who they are

In me.

 

I cannot hide them from myself

 

Or from the world.

 

And so I navigate this new land,

Frank in words, but not so frank

That they will sting.

My poetry was sharply honest, but

Not so honest that anyone knew.

 

Now the world can see my heart beating

And see itself pump through

My valves and veins.

 

And I must be careful

Oh so careful

Not to bleed on the world

 

With these personal pronouns.