something queer going on

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/04/the-big-idea-gary-jackson/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57156

Move over, Shakespeare in the Park, today we’ve got poet Gary Jackson and the Big Idea for his newest collection of poetry. Follow along to see how small lives speaks to the reader in an unprecedented way.

GARY JACKSON:

It’s no secret that I love persona poems. When I teach my intro to poetry students about voice and speaker, I routinely ask: Who is talking to whom about what? I pose the question hoping to prompt them to consider how a poet employs pronouns, point of view, and psychic distance to not only render a speaker, but also address an audience—both inside and outside the world of the poem—often creating simultaneous meanings that can even contradict.

All of my books engage with persona in different ways, including the poems in small lives, which began as a handful of disparate persona poems in the voices of superhumans. Some of the first pieces I wrote for this collection, like “fly” and “The Telepath quits her day job,” feature two different speakers navigating the extraordinary in our contemporary moment. Both poems use the first-person point of view because I like to bring the reader closer into the world I’m creating. Third person tends to put more psychic distance between speaker and reader than I want, and the voice can teeter toward the omniscient, which I’m not usually after. But as I wrote more of these superhuman voices, I realized two things: 1) I was juggling a lot of speakers, and 2) a few main characters were emerging to form the core of the story I was telling: The Invincible Woman, The Willpower Man, and The Telepath.

Having multiple speakers populate a collection wasn’t new to me—my previous books also employed multiple personas. The easiest way to handle persona in the speculative world of small lives was simply to name the poem after the speaker, which gives you titles like “The Heartless Boy,” “The Never-Ending Man,” and “The Precog” (though that last one is interesting because it’s not the Precog speaking to us, but her granddaughter). The title, while relatively simple, does a great deal of work introducing the speaker before the reader even enters the poem.

It was clear early on that The Willpower Man, The Telepath, and The Invincible Woman would be the three recurring speakers throughout the collection. And though many of their poems include their names in the titles, several do not. And several challenges emerged: when they interact with one another, what’s the best way to handle those crossovers? Without always relying on the first-person point of view, how can I make it clear who is speaking to whom? That’s when I realized I had been leaving out one pronoun almost entirely when it came to identifying the subject position of the speaker: you.

Like most poets, I frequently use the second person to signify an absence, a placeholder for some recipient, or a presence implied by the you—a finger pointing outward to implicate the reader or directly address them. But what about conflating speaker and reader, bringing them directly into the difficult and impossible choices these characters face? What if I collapsed that psychic and narrative distance even further?

Looking back through my drafts, one of the first poems featuring you was an early piece for The Invincible Woman, simply titled “The Invincible Woman,” which served as her introduction. It would eventually become “The Invincible Woman has a one-night stand,” but in that first draft there was a line (that’s no longer in the published version): “And the world, like all things that grow up, forgot you.” Maybe that’s why I chose the second person for her voice—I wanted a persona that implicated the reader, myself, and anyone who encountered the poem. That fear of being forgotten became a touchpoint not just for the superhumans in the collection, but for something universally human: how value can be cruelly assigned to a life based on who remembers you, or how important you’re deemed to be in the eyes of a cultural or social group, a country, a world.

Eventually, I found a cleaner way to manage multiple speakers: assign each a primary pronoun. The Willpower Man was easy—his poems had always been in the first-person I. Since The Invincible Woman began in the second-person you, I kept her there. The Telepath was trickier; early drafts and even some published versions alternated between first and second person. It wasn’t until I knew these characters would inhabit the same book that I realized she needed a distinct pronoun to avoid confusion. I settled on the third-person she, which worked well since the book was already rich with first- and second-person voices that pulled the reader directly into the world of small lives. Any psychic distance created by third person was offset by the other perspectives—and, because she is a telepath who can inhabit other minds, that slightly more omniscient lens felt fitting.

I also included a brief “cast of characters” meta-poem to further clarify and avoid confusion, which gave me an opportunity to acknowledge the fluidity of all three pronouns, as well as the collective we and us of the first-person plural that appears throughout the collection. At times, these voices conflate reader, character, speaker, and self, sometimes intentionally contradicting each other in the ways only poetry can.

small lives: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo|UNM Press

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/04/the-big-idea-gary-jackson/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57156