Patricia Smith
Flame - Spring 2007 

PATRICIA SMITH, lauded by critics as “a testament to the power of words to change lives,” is the author of four acclaimed poetry volumes—“Teahouse of the Almighty” (a 2005 National Poetry Series selection), “Close to Death,” “Life According to Motown” and “Big Towns, Big Talk.” Her work has been published in The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and other literary journals/anthologies, and performed around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Poets Stage in Stockholm, Rotterdam’s Poetry International Festival, the Aran Islands International Poetry and Prose Festival, the Bahia Festival, the Schomburg Center, the Sorbonne in Paris and on tour in Germany, Austria and Holland.  

A four-time individual champion on the National Poetry Slam, Smith has also been a featured poet on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and has performed three one-woman plays, one produced by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott.

In addition to her poetic works, Smith is also the author of “Africans in America,” a companion volume to the groundbreaking PBS documentary; Publishers Weekly called the book “a monumental research effort wed with fine writing…ultimately shaped by Smith’s beautiful narrative,” and Michelle Cliff of the San Jose Mercury News said, “With its vivid language and historical integrity, ‘Africans in America’ is a major contribution to this country’s written history.” Smith also penned the children’s book “Janna and the Kings,” which won Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Award.

Smith is currently at work on “Fixed on a Furious Star,” a biography of Harriet Tubman; also upcoming is a new poetry volume, “Blood Dazzler,” centered around the human devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and a young adult novel, “The Journey of Willie J.” She is the 2007 winner of the Chatauqua Literary Journal Award in poetry.

She has served as a Cave Canem faculty member, a Bruce McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University, and writer-in-residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. In 2006, during a ceremony at Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center, Smith was inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. 

The Persona: Patricia Smith interviewed by Cherryl Floyd-Miller

Whether she is assuming the voice of a Hurricane Katrina victim, a skinhead, or a small child observing Saturday morning barbershop rituals, on a stage, she is a current you get caught up in. If you have not had the experience of her transformative live “voice,” you have missed a critical layer of her art. She is a four-time National Slam winner and a highly sought teacher and performance artist. Make no assumptions about her ability to present the well-crafted poem on the page, though. Patricia Smith has become a master of the persona poem. The National Poetry Series winner (for Teahouse of the Almighty) talked to me recently from her New York home about crafting in persona.

CFM: I think that you and the poet Ai are two of the most gifted persona poets of our times. I want to talk to you about where the whole notion of persona comes from for you. Is that something you think you choose, does it choose you, or does something else happen?

PS: It’s a couple of things. When I was growing up – I’m originally from Chicago and from the part of Chicago – the Westside – that everyone tells you to stay away from … my parents came from the South, and I’m an only child. They were very, very protective, but their way of protecting me or introducing me to the world was keeping me away from it. So there was a lot of solitude. I mean, it wasn’t unhappy or anything, but it was just that I spent a lot of time on my own. Initially, my parents weren’t very good at answering questions about that outside world either, but so much of what I learned came from television and just came from my imagination. Every book I’d read, I’d want to be that person the next time. Because we weren’t really connected to our community (we were connected to the mainstream more), a lot of the images that I had were mainstream – you know, white folks doing this, and you know this is what life is supposed to be … but why are we here. My mother was just kind of in awe of white people her whole life. She had the viewpoint that, well, you know, be good to them and they’ll do good things for you. So, a lot of the early things that I did … I had this wire theme notebook, and I think I probably was about, I don’t know, nine or ten years old, and I used to fill this wire-theme notebook with the continuing adventures of this persona that I had developed, and her name was Erica, (‘cause it was the coolest thing I could ever think of – Erica). And she was white and she had blue eyes and really dark hair, which I thought was a cool combination. She was a cheerleader and her mother was a doctor and her father was a lawyer and she had six brothers, and she was homecoming queen and head cheerleader and blah-blah-blah, you know. No one exists like this, but I thought that this was kind of fulfilling the life that I wanted on paper. So my way of getting out in the world was to become these other characters.

I guess my way of getting out into the world was to develop these other characters – become these other characters. And I guess the way I really started writing seriously in persona is because when I got introduced to poetry, I was working as a newspaper reporter. I’d be working with facts during the day and you see these stories, as I think does anyone does who is tied into the news, even if it’s just reading the daily newspaper … you see these stories that don’t make sense. You know, they sadden you or they anger you. You look for some way to process it. Those of us who process creatively are very blessed to have that other side that we can always turn to. So, I would see a news story and I would think, Well, where was the person in this story before the instance of this story. Where did they go after the story? It’s like you place yourself at prospective place in the story and try to write your way out of it. A lot of times it would be almost like an exercise for me.

But then it sort of became … I thought that too many people who write don’t think about what happened long before that prospective entry point. I mean, when you sit down to think about September 11, or your grandmother or being carjacked or whatever, there are millions of people sitting down at the same time about the write the same thing. I mean, we don’t give enough thought to what makes our poems stand out. It’s very important to me that someone eventually (and I don’t even think I’ve reached that point yet) will see what I’ve written and know that it’s me whether or not my name is on it. Working in persona just expanded my options so much. I can write from my I feel/I believe/I need/I see viewpoint, or I can do that from several people’s viewpoints. I just thought that was part of being a writer. I never really get writer’s block or something. I never really do, because if I’m ever disgusted writing as me, I can put on these other shoes and go, “Hey, I don’t care if you don’t like this poem. It’s not really me, anyway.”

I skipped over this part, but my father was a real storyteller. He was used to sitting on porches in Arkansas entertaining everyone. So when he came to Chicago, I was his audience. He would ask me questions when we’d read the paper, you know, he’d say, “Well, where was this person going?” and I’d say, “Well, it doesn’t say where they were going.” Put yourself in their shoes; see what they saw. That to me was magical. It was really magical. In the beginning, I had a reliance on persona pieces because it’s an escape, but it can’t keep you from writing about yourself. You didn’t have to be yourself.

So, there was a progression with self, but not very well. I moved outward and began to write about other things. Persona helps develop the poet’s eye. Then when you come back to yourself with that knowledge, you can write about yourself in a way that is more insightful and probing than before.

CFM: Are there ever any scary moments when you’re doing the persona poem and you think that maybe this is you, or that persona has so much in common with you that the distinguishing line is very thin?

PS: Well, one piece was the skinhead poem. The skinhead poem I wrote because when I was living in New England, somebody painted a swastika on Plymouth Rock. And if you’ve ever gone through New England, it’s like, you don’t mess with any of their symbols. They lost their minds. They were looking for this person. They never found the person but the group they thought was responsible was called the White Youth League. It was some Aryan Nation group or something. So I read this interview, and this guy is spewing all this hatred – blacks, Jews, gays, and whatever. I thought, at some point, we started at a common point. He moved in that direction. I moved in another direction. So, I wanted to write a poem that would bring us back to a common area. And so I wrote it, and I thought it was an exercise, and I like it – liked what came out – and I started reading it. Then people would tell me how strange it would be for them to see this skinhead voice come from this black woman, and I thought, oh, I understand that. Then, an accent, some weird accent, started working its way into the poem. I didn’t know where it came from. It’s like … I finally decided the problem with persona is, eventually, if you do it correctly, the poem will begin to tell you how it wants to sound. Okay? I’m imagining what it’s like to be this person, and you’re headed in the wrong direction, and I think sometimes, the poem brings you back into line. With that one, I think I got a little bit more into its head than I wanted to. You think that you can do so much and cut it off. Then the accent started coming and I found myself having a hard time pulling out of the poem when it was done. I think that’s also happened to me with another poem I have about an undertaker. Because I realize that when I read the poem, there’s a danger that there are a lot of people who have had that experience exactly. You don’t realize how close you’ve gotten to the persona, because in the beginning, it’s just an active imagination. But if you hit it, it’s a scary thing. Even when I write about myself … not long ago, I made the commitment that there was nothing that I wouldn’t write about, because it’s not just the recreational act, it’s the way you move your life forward. For me, even if I wasn’t publishing anything, even if no one ever read this stuff, I would be writing poems and sticking them in kitchen drawers. I would just be reading them when I needed them and putting them back, because that’s kind of how I move my life forward. It’s my response to things. I take on difficult personas because it’s like solving a puzzle. It’s like, how close can I get to this person? How dead-on can I get to them until they start to speak to me and tell me where they want the poem to go?

CFM: You said you’ve made the commitment that there’s nothing that you won’t write about. I know many writers have encountered the taboo of personal subject matter and wrestled with the possible consequences. I remember once in a class I was teaching in Oregon, a little second-grade boy came to me afterwards and asked, “Do you care what other people think when you write your stuff? Is there anybody you would stop writing for?” He clarified his question by asking what if there were something that were true that you wanted to write about, but you didn’t want your family to know. I had to really think about that. Before he asked this, I had always believed my story is mine to tell without apology. I realized there was probably nothing I wouldn’t write about. After he asked me this, though, I knew there were definitely at least three people whose feelings and opinions could make me not publish something I’d written. Have you found yourself wrestling with this decision in some way?

PS: There was a regional Cave Canem class I taught, and one of the topics that we talked about was taboo. That went from writing about violence and sex, to writing about things that you know are going to involve another person or someone close to you. It was a memoir writing class where you encountered some sort of abuse or something like that, and you wonder, Do I leave this out, is this person still alive? Is this person going to see this book? … I think you have to just keep coming back to: Are you writing because it’s something you enjoy doing, and you get a little thrill out of seeing your name in print, and you’re onstage, and you like the people’s upturned faces and the fact that they’re all listening to you? OR are you writing because you have to? If you’re writing because you have to, the first line of business is to make sure the people closest to you realize that. My mother to this day … the concept of writing for a living does not fly with her. Some people just really see it as a game. Something you do if you’ve got some extra time and you want to fiddle with a pen and some paper. Until you sit down with people who are close to you and say, “I need for you to understand what this writing is doing for me.” Then when you begin the process of writing something that includes them, you can harbor some notion that they might understand it. If they don’t, you have to keep asking yourself what the writing is doing for you. You said maybe there are things you wouldn’t publish. Maybe in that scenario, it’s enough to just get it down on paper and share it with the person involved with the understanding that it won’t go anywhere else. For me, it’s enough to have people come up to you after a reading, or coming up holding your book and saying, “This has happened to me. I have felt this way, and didn’t know anybody else did.” At that point, it becomes a mission of sorts. There are all these people who don’t know that they have a second throat. There are people who might look at me and say, “Oh, she’s got all these great things happening, and I wish my life could be that great.” My life is not great. My son was in jail, and I had a big custody battle for my granddaughter, and a failed marriage, a mother I don’t completely understand, and my father was murdered at a real critical time in my life and … those are things that you can look at the veneer of a person and not see. I think it’s important to use the throat we have to make others realize they have it too. To say, well, yeah, this is what I went through with my son. My son understands. He would say, “When I was locked up, there were people who never got visitors. Or people who talked about their parents being too ashamed of them to come.” I really kinda feel like every person or every audience who picks up a poem you’ve written and reads it, you know … there’s somebody out there who needs, who can use, everything from your voice. There are people who need to not only know what you can do creatively, but a little bit of what you’re going through as a person, and how important it’s been to you to use that other throat. To pick up that pen and say, maybe I can’t make a difference this way, but at least I can put myself in a safer place. Sometimes, we write in order to get to a safer place in our heads. We can do that not only for ourselves, but for other people. Some of the questions like, I was abused by an uncle, you might say to yourself … Do I write about that? Do I show it to any other family members who may or may not be aware of it? When I think of that, I think about this woman I used to see at the meat market all the time and she was constantly battered – I mean, an eye closed, bruises on the side of her face. I remember my mother kind of shooing me to the side and saying, “Nothing’s wrong. It’s none of our business.” I think when you really, seriously call yourself a poet, your business kind of becomes everybody’s business. It’s not just the poet really. It’s the short story writer, the essayist, or whatever … it’s just as public as being an actress or something. Your life is right out there if you choose to put it out there. If you’re not breaking that barrier and writing about things that are going to may people say, “Hey, that may be an option for me,” then you’re not fulfilling all the possibilities you have as a writer.

CFM: What do you think is or should be the mission of persona poems in our current times?

PS: I think we tend to distance ourselves from whole segments of the population. I had someone ask me at one time, “Well, how can you write a persona poem in the voice of someone who is not of your race or your social class?” It’s interesting when they ask black people about writing personas in white voices, because that is our reality. I mean, that’s our mainstream. Those are images we were bombarded with from the time we could walk and talk … of course, we’re familiar with that. That’s all we see. I think the persona poem moves us out of our space, moves us out of our comfort zone where we’re almost forced to take a really hard look at another life. Whether it be something you’re just doing for the fun of it, like, you know, wow, what’s it like to be Little Richard for a day, or you’re sitting next to some woman who is clutching like twenty bags or something on the subway, you know that her whole life is in those bags, and you realize just how close everyone’s life is to your own. They may look really distant. You may say, “Oh my God, I’d never be a bag lady.” But starting to look at that persona and really examining it honestly, you realize how close we all are, and you may really be one paycheck away from that. So, it kind of forces us outside of ourselves – which we should all in a perfect world do naturally anyway. We should strive to relate to whoever it is that we meet, or we don’t meet, anyway. I mean, that’s what the human race is supposedly all about, but we don’t do that. Working in persona – if you do it enough – kind of makes that a second nature, even if it’s somebody you will never write about. You tend to take a closer look at their lives because you’re used to doing that in your creative work.

CFM: Part of what makes you such a good persona poet is the “believability” factor. The voices you give us are credible and so we hang on to them to find out more about what makes them human, to discover small pieces of our own realities may have some connection to your personas. What do you think beyond that credibility factor makes a good persona poem? Is there such a thing as a good persona poem, and one that is not so good?

PS: At one time, I heard Toni Morrison say that all of her novels, every single one of them, began with a question. The novel itself was her attempt to answer the question. Of course, she didn’t have those answers when she began. I’ve also heard people talk about persona and all of the research you have to do. You know, if you’re going to write a poem as a fireman, you have to go figure out what is it really that a fireman really does and what’s all of the equipment called and all of that. That’s kind of ridiculous. It’s really a matter of letting your curiosity get the best of you. It should be something you’re naturally curious about. You may sit and think, “Oh that would make a good poem because …” but if it’s not something you’re sparked by personally, it’s going to sound forced, and it’s not going to sound like you give a damn one way or the other if it works.

For me, I can’t worry about poetic structure. I don’t worry about how it’s going to look on the page. In the beginning, it’s just kind of a stream of consciousness thing. It’s like … listening to a conversation or listening to this person talk. Sometimes, I don’t even start to take things out of it until I’ve done it in front of an audience. That’s kind of what my revision process is like. It’s kind of like, Well, that didn’t feel good in the mouth, and that wouldn’t occur naturally in a conversation. I start to pull back things that way.

I think that natural curiosity is important. If you’ve ever seen a white person trying to do a black persona and they’re going back and forth trying to figure out, “Do I do the voice or the accent?” – you know … I might do something as a southern person or in an accent, but I don’t do the accent. The persona has to be strong enough in what it says, not necessarily how it says it. I’m speaking from the position of somebody who does a lot of readings. That’s not what you’re concerned with. It’s like, for these three minutes, I’m going to make you feel like this person is sitting here talking to you, so much so, that you’ll forget that you’re at a poetry reading or that I’m on a stage doing this for you or that you’re holding this book in this hand and you’re reading this piece.

So, if I have to pick one thing, I’d say it’s an overriding curiosity on the part of the poet. There’s a lot of times when you’ll see some big event happen, like, you know, September 11 or Hurricane Katrina, and immediately a thousand poets are headed for their computers, and they’re going to write something. What I said about finding the unexpected entry point, that’s where the persona lies. It’s not always the point that you think it should be. You think okay, well, I’m going to write a poem in the voice of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I have a series of poems now in the voice of a dog that was left tied to a cypress tree. It’s attempting to understand, you know, “Where’s Mudear?” You know, “If I bark this way, Mudear usually comes out and gives me this.” And just kinda trying on all the shoes of a story until you find the shoes that are the most uncomfortable. That’s the one that’s going to stand up and make people take notice. It’s not always just saying I’m going to write a poem in persona, but picking the persona that will make that poem different from all the other poems that are being written about the same subject.

CFM: One of the things we have in common is that we create in different genres. I think that persona might drive some of your work in other genres, too. I can definitely see it in theatre pieces, but I think it might be across the board. I’m going to ask, is there a Patricia Smith persona? If so, when do you think that persona gets turned on and off in your process? Like, I would love to see the poem written by Patricia Smith about the persona Patricia Smith.

PS: Ohhhh, would you now? I think that persona is probably an evolving persona. I guess when I sit down to write something about myself, the persona is lurking there. I’m kind of afraid to let the whole thing out. When writing about something that happened to me personally, it’s usually about an event. It’s about somebody in my life or some snapshot of something that’s happened. I always have in mind who at this point I believe I am. That includes some triumphs, a lot of failures … they don’t really come out unless they are relevant to whatever snapshot I’m writing. If I’m writing something about my family or a moment from my past and my mother walks through … then what I realize is that my mother and I really don’t know each other very well and don’t show any inclination toward doing that … That’s a really hard conclusion to come to, but it’s an essential part of my persona right now. It’s not something I’ve sat down to write about yet, because I’m still right in the midst of it and don’t know what’ll happen if I put pen to paper on that. It took a while for me to write about my father after my father was murdered. It took about four years before A) I finished a really honest poem about him, and B) I’m still trying to figure out how much of my father is in me. That persona … I guess I’m a little frightened by it, but it’s there, and I know it’s coming to the surface eventually. It’s complicated; it feels like I’m in the eye of a storm and once it passes over, and I don’t know how much damage it’s going to do.

CFM: Any tricks of the trade you can give to people to talk to them about how to enter the realm of writing a persona poem? What’s the Patricia Smith process? Do you sit and close your eyes and write the poem (or let the poem write you)? What is the whole process of writing in persona about?

PS: Thinking over the ones that are clearest to me and the ones that have been the most successful, they all kind of started with just having the persona say something that’s important to them. If you have developed a poet’s eye, or a writer’s eye or a poet’s ear, you’re going to let them keep talking. It’s not something like, “Oh, you know, I’m a fireman, and I get up every day and I go to …” You don’t want them talking necessarily about their process, unless their process is something like burying someone or doing makeup for someone who is dead. It’s just not enough. No matter how intriguing the job is or how intriguing their day might be, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to say, “I’ve picked the ideal persona” and then just write a plain poem with them in that space.

There’s got to be some wrinkle in the life of the person you’re writing about. Something they’re angry about. There’s a texture to it. What’s sparking you to write the persona and what’s sparking the persona to talk to you? A lot of times, it’s not just the job or whatever. It’s something that’s happened in their life that’s making them talk, that has them angered or sad or about to jump off of a building. You put them in a situation that interesting.

People think, first of all, that fact that they’re writing in persona is a big deal. If they find a persona that no one has thought about, that’s a big deal. But that’s still not enough. The persona has to be engaged in something that’s also interesting. So, you’ve got three things that you have to deal with. First of all, you’ve got to make a commitment to writing in persona. Then you have to have a person that’s not just your run-of-the-mill person. Then the person has got to be engaged in something interesting. To have those three balls in the air sometimes is difficult. There have been a lot of people who say, I’m going to write a persona poem. They say, This is a housewife. They use the pronoun I, and that’s it for them. Nothing exciting happens for this housewife … I wait for my husband to come home. I fix his dinner. I resent him. And then what?

If you can change the pronoun and make it a third person and it’s not interesting for you, making it persona is not going to make it any more interesting. To me. if you make sure that the persona is in some kind of energetic situation, the first line always comes to you. Talking about the undertaker, when a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes. Now that’s going to make you sit up and take notice because he’s talking about something that he has to do that’s a problem for him. So, you’re plopped down right in the middle of his drama. You’re immediately engaged. That’s something that’s really important that I don’t think a lot of people think through.

For a long time, I tended to put a tiptoe in my poems. I’d set them up too much. The poem that I have about the barbershop. If you look in the book, there’s this whole stuff about, “It’s a Saturday morning, and here’s what’s going on around the barber shop, and here’s who’s walking around, and this is what the barber shop looks like …”  I found that when I performed, I skipped all of that and just got right to the voice. That was a lesson I gave to myself. You don’t drop a persona right in the middle of an ordinary poem. It’s a sign that you don’t really think your persona is strong enough yet, so you have to surround it by all this other stuff. If you find yourself doing that, the problem is not in the poem; it’s in the persona. You have to make your persona say something that’s going to bring people to you. I always imagine somebody out in the hall at a reading buying books or going for a drink something, and you need to get them to run back into the room and say, “What? What was that? What did she say? What?” That’s always in the back of my mind. There’s got to be a couple of layers of drama; and the persona’s got to be right in the middle of a drama of its own.

CFM: One of the other things you do that’s really nice is maintaining some sense of authenticity, because you don’t alter the language once you’re inside of the persona. If somebody wants to say “ain’t,” then they say “ain’t.” You don’t clean it up. That lends itself very easily to the world of theatre. What made you pursue theatre? Or did theatre come first and get pushed back for poetry? How did that whole collaboration evolve?

PS: During a reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts, somebody came up to me and said they were studying with Derek Walcott. They wanted to bring him to my next reading. The next reading I did Derek Walcott was there. He had been exploring the idea of poetic theatre. And that makes sense for him, because he’s always has these wonderful sweeping epics. We talked a little afterwards and he told me that he had a theatre that he was programming. I had done a lot of narrative poems; I had done a lot of persona pieces. He started visualizing a show of linked persona poems. There was kind of a narrative thread running through them, but not really, but it was something that could be developed with a little work between the poems.

So, Boston University Playwrights Theatre started working on this with me. It was just me and a musician – a guitarist and some technical people that we talked to about lighting and things. The thing that was most challenging, and where I really had to stand up for myself, was … I had this director, and she wanted me to do these pieces kind of emoting to the back row but looking over the audience’s heads to some weird spot on the back wall. That drove me crazy. I think I did one show before I said, you know, the audience is right here. Part of what I like to do even during readings is kind of like break that wall, so it’s not like I am poet, you are audience and we shall never meet, but kind of coming out to the audience sometimes, or even something as simple as leaving the microphone. I said, “I can’t do this like this. If there is an audience right here at my feet, then I have to talk to them.” We tussled over that and then we were fine.

Lo and behold, it was reviewed as theatre. I went, “Oh, that was easy.” People said, “We didn’t know you had an acting background.” I don’t. If you hand me something that you’ve written, I can’t do it … because I don’t know what sparked you. I don’t know where they [the poems] came from. Every one of these poems, I know what made me write them, so it’s easy for me to get back to that moment. So that’s what got me to thinking that what I was doing as a poet and what I had imagined as this totally different world of theatre were not that far apart at all.

It’s always in my head when I’m writing that this is another avenue that’s available. I’d love to sit down with a playwright and say, “What are the possibilities? What’s missing? What else is out there.” If you really are impassioned about writing, then you should want to write in as many ways as you can. I don’t see why we box ourselves. We’re always in a rush to specialize. It’s like I’ve got to call myself something, I can’t just be a writer … it’s more impressive to say “I’m a playwright,” or it’s more impressive to say, “I’m a poet” (well … it’s not that impressive to say I’m a poet …), but I don’t see how anyone can write and not delve into these other areas. It’s right there. It’s a big deal when I’m teaching a poetry class to tell people, “Ookay, the poem is like a snapshot, but the people moving through that poem existed before the poem and will exist after. So who are they? Where are they going next? What are they doing? What are they thinking?” Stretch your poem a little bit in each direction and the poem could become a short story just like that. All you need to do is figure out the form. You could even take a scene out of a play and turn it into a poem. It’s frustrating to me how much talented people are perfectly content to stay in a box. First of all, what we do is exciting. But even if you’re going to the next chapter, the next poem, the next scene, it’s a blank canvas. How many people can wake up and say that their lives are different every day?

CFM: Are you a writer, period, or do you feel like I’m primarily a poet who opens herself to all these other possibilities?

PS: I will say I’m a writer. I’ve had a couple of struggles. One was that I got introduced to poetry by getting up on stage and doing it. So, it’s taken forever to be known as something other than a performer. The essential element in everything is the poetry. If I was forced to pick something to call myself, I would pick “poet,” but “writer” is fine for now. What makes the other writing successful is that I see things with a poet’s eye and I hear things with a poet’s ear. Rhythm is always important to me. Finding a musical way to say things without it sounding phony and strained … there’s a line there. Seeing things as the poet sees things becomes inherent.