I live
on the Ohio River, and outside my bedroom window I have been watching the
construction of a new bridge. It is the only bridge on this part of the river
for roughly 40 miles, so it is significant in many ways to my community. The
importance of this new bridge, as well as the old one, has inspired numerous
poems lately, and I hope to compile them into a chapbook.
I have
mostly explored the bridge from the first person point of view, and all the
poems are rooted in my personal experience. I have some familial ties to the
history of the old bridge, currently being demolished, and I have personal ties
to individuals working on the new bridge. As I dive deeper into this project, I
have considered using the persona poem to add depth and complexity to this subject.
Gabrielle
Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia
Earhart recently inspired me. In particular, in her cycle of persona poems
surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, Calvocoressi is able to use
unique, historical perspectives to explore universal themes. In poem V. of the “Amelia Earhart” cycle,
“Doris Luman, housewife,” a witness poem becomes a meditation on loss from the
perspective of a wife and mother. The speaker is responding to the news of
Earhart’s disappearance and nonchalantly discusses loss as an everyday
occurrence. One immediately thinks of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” wherein the
poet claims loss is not a disaster, although it may seem to be at times. The first line of Calvocoressi’s poem is
similar:
It’s easy to lose someone. Last
week, walking my son to school,
I turned away for a second.
The next thing I know he’s in the street.
(1-4).
In this poem, the housewife is clearly more
concerned with what is happening in her domestic sphere than with public
figures. Choosing the housewife as one
of the personas allows Calvocoressi to take the exploration of loss to an
unexpected place: the home. The ultimate human notion of safety revolves around
the home, and the speaker in this poem is turning that notion on its head. The
poem moves inward, and the meditation on loss dives into the themes of safety
and permanence:
You can lose a person at home
In the safest possible place,
a place you could walk blindfolded.
that’s why I wasn’t surprised
when that woman got lost. (12-16)
The
speaker refers to Earhart as “that woman,” a telling detail in the speaker’s
reaction to the news of Earhart’s disappearance. Tragedies happen in the sky
and they happen inside the home, and it is not the magnitude of the setting
that dictates the severity of its effects the human mind.
These poems lend a personal context to the
events surrounding a celebrity. By using different personas to look at
Earhart’s disappearance, Calvocoressi allows room for truths to emerge that
speak to the human condition and go well beyond the historical event. If the
poet had only allowed her own reactions to Earhart’s story to be the subject of
these poems, they would be missing the depth and diversity of human experience
that gives these poems their universal appeal.
I hope
that my bridge poems can explore my particular experience with a highly public
happening while achieving some kind of balance with those themes on a universal
level. Reading Calvocoressi’s persona poems, I was moved to reach deeper into
my speakers’ dreams, memories and, sometimes, darkest thoughts. Diving into the
subconscious via the persona poems in the style of Calvocoressi seems like a promising
avenue to take my “bridge poems” to the next level.
Angela Elles is
a resident of Madison, Indiana. A mom, wife, teacher, and student, Angela
teaches at Ivy Tech Community College and is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at
Spalding University.
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