How to Write a Historical Persona Poem
In my last post, I wrote about how I put my manuscript together. This time, I’ll go behind the scenes of a single poem “Trudy Swims the Channel” and discuss how I write persona poems based on historical figures. If you want to read the poem before going backstage, you can find it in Acoustic Shadows or read it online at Kitchen Table Quarterly.
Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle was the first woman (and 6th person to swim the English Channel); despite having to swim through some unpredicted storms squalls, she knocked a casual two hours off the previous record. I picked up a biography (Glenn Stout’s Young Woman and the Sea) in 2020, watched some early video footage of her swim, and sensed that a poem about this story (full of sisters, music, and water) might belong in Acoustic Shadows. Then I spent the next 18th months drafting and redrafting poems about Trudy. At first, I tried to fit in Way Too Many Facts because it was all so fascinating and wound up with a poem that felt long and slow (not at all the right fit for Trudy’s record-breaking speed), so my revision process was about discerning what was most essential (for me, in 2021) about her story and finding ways to amplify and highlight those essentials.
Along the way, I realized that there are two keys to writing a historical persona poem.
The first key is personal resonance. Trudy might be the speaker of the poem, but I was the one writing it, so the poem needed to matter to me (not just in a this-is-cool-history-way, but in a this-is-something-I-need-to-say way)—and I needed to understand what Trudy and I had in common. At first glance, not much. She was an Olympic athlete and record-breaking swimmer, and I was a writer with a history of bursting into tears during childhood swim meets. But, as I dug deeper, I realized that we had both chosen careers that required hours and hours of solitary practice. We’d both been told by well-meaning strangers that we should choose less risky paths. Trudy’s story was a story about staying focused on the challenge you’ve set for yourself no matter others have to say about it—and that was something I needed to celebrate.
The second key is cultural resonance—by this I mean the parallels or similarities between the moment I am writing from and the moment I am writing about, the things that make that historical moment a mirror for this one. Trudy made her swim at a time when new technologies had just made near-instant (though slow by our standards) communication possible. News was becoming more global and a culture of worshiping (and shaming) celebrities was taking hold. Sounds familiar, right? After her first failed attempt at a Channel crossing, Trudy had to find a way to keep swimming through visibility, distraction, and controversy.
Once I had these two keys clear in my mind, I was able to see which lines and facts could be cut, and I could revise images and phrasing to play up and amplify the two resonances (persona and cultural) that I’d identified. Research-based writing is never easy, but having a sense of clarity and purpose always makes it much easier.
