It’s easy (ish) to write about ourselves. It’s not as easy to write about others. But poetry allows us to lend our minds to lives we haven’t lived. Persona poetry is an example of this, but for this prompt, we’re going to write portraits of people who aren’t us—with a twist.

Freewrite

Think of a famous person or historical figure, living or dead, whom you know about in great detail.

For 7-10 minutes:

Write down what you know about this person. Where did they live? What were they like? What was their philosophy of living? Jot down everything you can, from major life stories to tiny facts.

For 2-3 minutes: 

What connect you to this person? What do you have in common with them, or how are you in lineage with them? Where does your life intersect with theirs?

Poem: “Power” by Adrienne Rich

Retrieved from her collection The Dream of a Common Language (1978).

Living     in the earth-deposits     of our history

Today a backhoe divulged     out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle     amber     perfect     a hundred-year-old
cure for fever     or melancholy     a tonic
for living on this earth     in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered     from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years     by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin     of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died     a famous woman     denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds     came     from the same source as her power

Divinations

This poem is a bit enigmatic at first, but really rewarding to parse. The associative leap from the second stanza to the third is quite grand, those gaps between words feel both meaningful and random, and the poem’s own journey seems roundabout. How did we get to that (incredible) last stanza?

Let’s break down these stanzas:

Living     in the earth-deposits     of our history

We’re introduced to two aspects of this poem. First, the poem’s use of whitespace, which feel almost like internal line breaks. At the very least, they make the reader pause more with the language.

Second, this elegant metaphor wherein history is earth-deposited. It’s a useful image and allows what follows in the poem to be more symbolic.

Today a backhoe divulged     out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle     amber     perfect     a hundred-year-old
cure for fever     or melancholy     a tonic
for living on this earth     in the winters of this climate

Since history is layered like the dirt, these images could be both literal objects and symbols for something else. The speaker tells us the bottle is a cure for some ailment, but not what the ailment might be—and it’s “divulged” from a backhoe, which lends a strange sense of construction work to an otherwise mysterious image.

Divulged is a surprising verb. You divulge information, not hidden objects. So there’s a further sense of the real and the symbolic mingling here in images whose meanings are not yet divulged to us.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered     from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years     by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin     of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

Some notes:

• This is the first, and only, introduction of an “I” in the poem.
• The speaker assumes something about Marie Curie’s knowledge. Why? Did Marie Curie know she was irradiating herself—and how could she, when radiation was such a new science?
• Notice a subtle shift in the poem’s sounds: the thrumming b’s and p’s in “body,” “bombarded,” and “purified” to the hard, uninhabitable c’s and s’s: “cataracts,” “cracked,” “suppurating skin.”

There’s something charming, to me, about that first line. Not only is the “I” so brief that it hardly registers, it’s also true of the reader. By reading this poem, you, too, read about Marie Curie today. The “I” is a real speaker, but so anonymous that it might as well be you.

But we never fully lose that sense of the speaker, either. For example, the speaker says “she must have known she suffered.” That phrase, “she must,” inserts the speaker’s perspective in such a way that we know we are hypothesizing in the mind of someone else. Without those notes, this poem would, arguably, be more fictitious, with language that borders on being what’s called free indirect discourse.

She died     a famous woman     denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds     came     from the same source as her power

Those line breaks are so good. A line breaks where the line is deemed a complete unit, so these line breaks emphasize the following:

Marie Curie:

• Died a famous woman denying
• She also died denying her wounds
• Denying her wounds also came from the same source as her power

Thus, the source of her power is both the source of her life and the source of her death.

Which is true of her work with radium: it both memorialized our two-time Nobel Prize-winning Maria Skłodowska in the annals of history—and, it killed her.

But is the power her work with radium? No, it’s something deeper, more mysterious and symbolic, divulged from history’s deposits yet sacred and singular to Marie.

Portrait Poetry Prompt

Adrienne Rich’s poem offers an incredible, if enigmatic, portrait of Marie Curie. It’s as though the poem distilled Curie into her radiant, radiating essence, and bottled that essence in verse. The poem also has a briefly stated “I” whose presence, while not central, nonetheless puts Curie’s life in conversation with the speaker’s.

You’ll do the same. Your prompt is to write a portrait of someone other than yourself, and only briefly include an “I” or self-insert somewhere in the poem. Your focus should remain on the person of your portrait, but also link this person to your own life. Use your freewrite from earlier to guide you.