Halloween and the First Personal Singular

 

Halloween and the First Personal Singular was used to introduce A Feast of Halloweens at Personal Mythologies II at KWH, on September 20, 2003.

A funny thing has been happening to me lately whenever I attempt to compose a poem. Maybe it’s age; maybe it’s maturity; maybe it’s the pervasive influence of post-modernism and its paradigmatic exponents— Ashbery, Creeley, and the rest. Whatever the cause, I suddenly feel very shaky whenever I find myself using “I” in a poem. In younger and more innocent days, I would bandy the first person singular about with unbounded relish, as though my subjective impressions, emotional vicissitudes, and personal experiential reactions were the stuff of Muse-worthy poesy, and, you know, sometimes I was right. Maybe one in ten times. I could afford to shoot my poetic arrows recklessly because I wasn’t really an adult yet, with adult concerns, responsibilities, and hang-ups. Now all that’s changed, I see the broader realities, and “I” seems like something that must be transcended.

The catch is that I still like to write autobiographical poems. The truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction, and I’ve certainly been through my fair share of mishigas. So, to write a personal impersonal poem, or a poem that effectively balances this polarity, has become of paramount importance. The key, I guess, is to channel one’s experiences through an objectivist lens, making inductive leaps along the way, to lend universality and perspective. So, the poem is narrated from the second or third person, and the self becomes just another character in a larger mosaic of circumstances, images, actions. This is much easier said than done. It is a temptation to slip in an “I” here and there in the same degree that it’s a temptation to fit one more little scoop of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch into your bowl. Truth be told, used sparingly, “I” lends authenticity and a certain warmth to a poem, a sense of “there-ness” that nothing else would give. So I like to think of “I” as the Ben and Jerry’s of poetic creation— it is gratifying, but needs a sense of restraint to allow it grace.

This is an occasional poem, for an occasion that never transpired. An online journal called Hinge published a poem of mine this summer. They also issued a call for poems about Halloween, for their fall issue. Gotta do it, I thought, and came up with this piece. Then I realized that the majority of journal demur from printing the same poet in consecutive issues. Undaunted I sent this piece to a fledgling journal called Cake Train, and it was accepted immediately. Once in a while, navigating the straits of the Bay of Poesy, you get a miracle. That’s what happened here. Twenty-four lines, one “I,” and it’s all about me. Am I getting grown up or what?