The Time: Winter, First Year
The Class: Intro to Creative Writing
The Assignment: Write a persona poem. (Uh-oh.)
Human Interest Story by Jordan Meiller I. Grace The nurses, you know, they say I'm brave they say, and I say all I'm doin is livin I say what's so brave about that, but they just keep goin on about it – one of em, the one I told you bout, writes in her little notebook all the time, she say yesterday she say I show Grace In The Face Of Adversity, just like that she say it like a sermon, like she knows somethin I don't. But like I was sayin these nurses, they say I'm brave and all with that look you know, that look like I'm going on a blind date with the Devil's ex-wife. II. Whiskey It's the little things you miss, you know, bein laid up in here for so long. Like those quiet Saturday nights, shut the lights around nine, take the phone off the hook, just sit back in my chair. Good chair got age to it, got a history, not like these squeaky metal beds just rolled off the line. Sit back, sometimes put a record on, maybe Fats Waller or Wes Montgomery, just sit back and listen for a while. Round ten-thirty, just before turnin in for the night, if I was feelin good, treat myself to a glass of whiskey, just one mind, but one's enough. You don't know a good drink till you've had a glass of single malt whiskey. You can taste the earth in it. You can taste where you came from, where you gonna go. Jello don't taste like nothin. III. Rats Unc, he worked back then in the Koo-laid factory (that's just the way he said it, Koo-laid just like that) back then in the Koo-laid factory Unc worked at the vats, they had all the Koo-laid in these big vats and Unc worked there mixin all that Koo-laid in these big vats they had and there were rats Unc said, there were rats back then in the Koo-laid factory and he could hear them scurryin through the vents and pipes and whatnot and sometimes Unc said, sometimes a rat would fall in one of the big vats they had but they didn't want to have to stop mixin all that Koo-laid and dump it all out of the big vat so they said he couldn't dump all that Koo-laid for one rat not for one rat no not for two rats neither he had to wait for three rats Unc said, had to wait till he saw three rats swimmin in that big vat of Koo-laid before they gave up and dumped it all out, and man today's been a three-rat kinda day, for sure.
Grade: A± (I don’t know the exact grade but it was definitely in the A range.)
Professor’s Comments: Generally positive. (I don’t have a record of the comments for this one.)
My Comments: Okay, let’s start with some context. It was, at a guess, Wednesday. We’d read a bunch of persona poems in class and talked about them, and now had to write one of our own, due Friday. I was feeling pretty stumped for what to write (or rather, who to write as).
I was hanging out with my roommates, and one of them, a Black guy, tells this story about his grandfather who worked in a Kool-Aid factory, and how he wasn’t allowed to clean out the Kool-Aid unless there were at least three rats in it. So I, the clever writer that I am, decided to steal that story. The poem I produced was just part 3, “Rats,” of what became “Human Interest Story,” and I’ll get to why that makes this all so much worse.
After writing the poem, I showed it to my roommate, and he said he liked it. He showed it to his mom, whose dad the poem was based on, and she said she liked it. So I guess there was no problem and I can just stop here, right? Well, that’s what I thought anyway.
The exact moment I knew that maybe I’d messed up was when I was called upon to read my poem out loud in class. Because, in case it’s not clear yet, I’d written an entire poem in the voice of a stereotypical “old Black man,” and it was only when faced with the prospect of physically speaking in that voice that I realized what a terrible thing I’d done. Slightly panicking, I tried to read the poem in just a generic Southern accent. I don’t really know if I pulled it off, and to this day I don’t really know what the (as far as I can remember) only Black student in the room thought about it.
You’d think, though, that that would be it. I wrote a poem without thinking about what I was doing, immediately realized my mistake upon having to read it, and it was never brought up again. The problem, though, is that everyone (as far as I knew) liked it. So much so that they named our class reading after it:
So, despite my discomfort, I let myself believe that if everyone else liked it then surely it wasn’t a problem. I bought into this belief so much that I doubled down. I wrote the additional sections to the poem that you see above, and I submitted “Human Interest Story” (under a different, stupider title) to my college’s literary journal (and they published it). I also wrote another poem in the same voice for a different assignment, and, well, if you weren’t convinced that the first one was racist:
Prison (A Poem With Lines In Any Order) First week inside Unc traded two packs for a guitar and taught himself the blues which didn't take much teachin. So this is little Marcus he say then he get serious, Marcus he say what do you think about a man just outa prison? His pops had lost his job like people do, and Unc bein the responsible type decided to rob a bank. Six years old, all Momma tell me is he's my uncle and I should be kind so that's what I'm gonna do. Judge bein the responsible type gave Unc eight years and a stern talking to. No six-year-old gonna hold judgment over his uncle you know. Unc is twenty-six years old and been a man for almost as long as that. We meet him at the gate, Momma and me, he got a box and his guitar and the blues of course. Unc smile down at me real wide and lay his pickin hand on my shoulder. Two days after his twenty-sixth birthday Unc gets outa prison, for the first and last time it should be said. Two days after his eighteenth birthday Unc went off to prison, for the first and last time it should be said.
Yeah. This one really hurts. This is the one that really makes me feel like shit.
But it was “Rats” that stuck around, thanks mostly to my professor using the poem in future Intro classes (including ones that I TA’d). So for the next three-and-a-half years it would pop up in my life every once and while, and every time all I would do is wince and hope it went away.
So, to summarize: I appropriated a Black person’s family story for my own poem, reducing his grandfather to a caricature, expanded on that story based solely on stereotypes and tropes, gained moderate acclaim for it, and spent several years silently ashamed while continuing to be praised for it.
What should I have done instead? Well, not written the poem in the first place, obviously, but failing that, I should have spoken up as soon as I realized what I’d done. I shouldn’t have let the reading be centered around the poem, I shouldn’t have written more in the same voice, I shouldn’t have submitted it to the journal, I shouldn’t have let them publish it, and I shouldn’t have let my professor use it in future classes unless as an example to white students of what not to do.
If I’d made any of those decisions differently this would be a story about how I made a mistake, held myself accountable for it, and grew from the experience. Instead it’s a story about how I made a mistake and tried to ignore it for years, assuming that if no one else was going to hold me accountable than I didn’t need to either. I would actually imagine someone uncovering the poem and calling me out for it, and then I could finally be like, “Yeah, that was so bad, I really regret it, oof,” and move on. Somehow that seemed less painful to me than just calling myself out. But when I was going through my old work to pick out possible entries for this series, I knew the time had come.
I want to be clear here: this is about me, not my classmates, not my professor, not the students who worked on the journal. I’m the only one who knew exactly where these poems came from. I’m the one responsible, and I’m sorry to anyone who was hurt by it then or is hurt by learning about it now.
Ostensibly the point of this series is to give advice to college students, so here’s some advice: don’t do what I did. Persona poems (or any kind of creative writing) are not an excuse to try on another culture of which you have little to no experience or knowledge. And if you do do something like this, address it as soon as you realize you’ve messed up. If you think someone else is doing something like this, talk to them about it, and if someone brings you up on it, listen to them. Write responsibly.
Certain of Eventual Failure 