The Jewish holiday Purim is here, and I admit it is probably my least favorite of all the Jewish holidays. In Purim, people dress up as other people, similar to how people dress up for Halloween.
For most of my adult years, I avoided dressing up for Purim. I always feel ridiculous in costume, even though I'm certainly not the only one dressed up, and that silliness is part of the purpose of this holiday.
However, Purim (and Halloween, for that matter) allows me to do something I don't get to do too much in my everyday life: imagine what would happen if I were someone else. Putting myself in another person’s shoes allows me to leave my point of view for a moment and try to see the world from a new angle, even if only for a few hours.
This ability to embody someone else is a critical ability for writers. Prose writers, for example, must enter and exit the minds of dozens of characters in each story they write. They have to do that for every character in their story to have their unique inner world. If the prose writer cannot get out of herself and write from the point of view of her characters, she will not be able to build reliable and well-rounded characters.
But is the same true for poetry writers?
Can I only tell about myself?
As early as 1930, the poet Rachel Blobstein (Rachel the Poet) wrote, "I only knew about myself to tell." Over the years, this phrase has become a symbol among Israeli poets. For some reason, poets generally perceive that they cannot write from someone else's point of view, while novelists can. Is there any truth in this?
Although most poets throughout history have written mainly about themselves, you can find examples of poets who write from someone else's point of view. For example, Yona Wallach wrote several poems as a male speaker, such as in the poem "Strawberries." On the other hand, you can find the poet Alexander Penn, who wrote the poem "Confession" from a woman's point of view. In my book "The Emissary," I also wrote some poems in which the speakers in the poem were not myself (such as in the poems "The Girl on the Bench," "The Teacher," and "The Man in the Bar").
It is important to note that the fact that certain poets choose to write mainly about themselves does not indicate their nature as a good or bad poets. On the contrary, because those poets can dive into the depths of their souls in such a true and honest way, this is where their poems stem from, containing an important inner truth.
There is something about poetry that is so intimate and unfakeable. When you're trying to write poetry from someone else's point of view, you must ensure you have the tools to enter that person's inner world. Because poetry is so concise and generally short, it reveals every flaw in the mask the writer tries to convey. If you try to write about someone you don't know or a topic you don't know about, your audience will pick up on it immediately.
Seven levels of alienation
To help you (and myself) understand how similar the speaker in my poem is to me, I usually use a model I like to call Seven Levels of Alienation (don't look it up on the internet. It's my invention). One can put any character that is the speaker of a poem into the following seven levels, from the most familiar to the least familiar:
Myself now: If I write about myself in the present, I have the greatest affinity with the speaker of the poem. All the speaker's feelings, thoughts, and emotions in the poem are my own. No alienation at all.
My past self: When I write a poem about myself in retrospect, I can somewhat enjoy the best of both worlds, both the closeness (after all, it's about myself) and the natural alienation that comes from the passage of time (we all change and mature all the time, and this creates alienation to those we were in the past).
A relative or close friend: Here, I step outside myself and write through someone else's eyes. However, at this level, it is about someone with whom I have an intimate relationship, and therefore, I have an exclusive and unique window into their inner world. It may be a spouse, a parent, a best friend, my children, etc. At this level, I am writing about someone who is not me, but I have enough knowledge and personal acquaintance with the speaker to put myself in their shoes.
Distant acquaintance: sometimes I can write about someone who was once close to me and now is no longer, or a distant relative I hardly know. On the one hand, this is a familiar person I met in person. On the other hand, the level of alienation here is higher. Unlike the previous level, where the acquaintance is personal and intimate, familiarity exists at a much lower level here.
A person I met once: There are people whose influence on us is so great that one meeting is enough for them to fill our hearts. At this level, I write about someone I have met personally, but only a few times (no more than two or three times). On the one hand, I don't have enough knowledge about the speaker's inner world. On the other hand, there is an unmediated acquaintance with them.
A well-known celebrity: At this level, I write about a famous personality with a rich and available corpus of information in the form of biographies, interviews, newspaper articles, quotes, and more. When I try to write about someone famous, I enjoy the knowledge I have about that character from external sources, but there is no personal acquaintance here at all. Such a poem will be fueled mainly by speculation because I have almost no access to the speaker's inner world. Even if I read all the material available about a certain personality, and even if I read their autobiography as they wrote it about themselves, I am still at a high level of alienation because all these writings are processed and inauthentic fragments. Every writing is a filter to a person’s inner world. Therefore, those sources will never allow me to fully enter into this inner world of the person I chose to write about.
A person I have never met or heard of: this is the highest level of alienation. Here, I am trying to write about someone I don't know and have never met. A good example of this level is writing "about the hungry people in Africa." I have never visited Africa or met a hungry person from there, so I have no personal connection to this issue. I can write about this topic if it speaks to my heart, but the level of alienation here is extremely high.
When you write a poem from the point of view of a character other than yourself, you should ask yourself: at what level of alienation is this character I'm writing about? Do I have the tools to write a poem from their shoes? Do I know the inner world of this character, or can I imagine this world? Can I represent this character truly and honestly?
So why bother putting on a mask?
As writers who aspire to publicize their poetry, we must remember that different people will read our poems. Even though they are all so personal, our poems become public as soon as we release them.
I believe writing under someone else's mask is an exercise in empathy. When I exercise in writing from someone else's point of view, I can practice my ability to empathize with someone who is not me. That way, the next time I choose to write a "normal" poem from my point of view, I will potentially also have the perspective of writing from this character's point of view. This way, I can write poems when the speaker is myself and still reach people different from me.
Of course, writing through such a speaker cannot wholly eliminate the self. You, too, will find yourself "faking" a bit and filling your speaker with the insights you have about them and not with the insights they have about themselves. This filling of the gaps is a natural part of writing in a different character’s eyes and has no magic solution.
I once heard a poet read his poem in which the speaker was his mother and in which he wrote, "I know how bad I treated you." I admit that I couldn't help but think whether his mother would really have said that sentence or whether it was wishful thinking on the writer's part. In any case, no matter how realistic this sentence is when it comes from his mother's lips, just actually writing this sentence in that poem had a healing factor, which is enough to fulfill the poet's need.
I think that just trying to get out of ourselves is crucial, not only as writers but also as human beings on this planet who live among people. And in that process, because we are writers, we must strengthen this sensitivity to the people around us. Writing from another person's point of view is a great way to achieve that.
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