for her burning
face in my poem
beautifully carries
the scent of
a beloved face that’s missing

—“Meaning of Her Absence,”Alejandra Pizarnik,
trans. Yvette Siegert, Extracting the Stone of Madness (New Directions, 2016)

When naming this workshop on the poet’s self-portrait, I borrowed a line from an Alejandra Pizarnik poem. Though the self is often fragmented, elusive, and intangible in Pizarnik’s poems, we still receive remarkably memorable portraits that render the kaleidoscopic self visible. In the poem excerpted above, the burning of one face recalls the absence of another (both are manifestations of a divided self). To me, Pizarnik’s poetry is evidence of two ideas I’m obsessed with: that a poem can be a visual object—a portrait—and that a poem’s capacity to hold various images (or moving, contrasting, or surreal images) allows poets to extend the form of self-portraiture.

Because self-portraiture is a practice with firm roots in visual art, I was intent on analyzing poems as if they were artworks—using visual art terminology. Specifically, we considered notions of composition, light, dark, and shadow, abstraction, symbolism, and texture. And because the form of poetry challenges fixity and two-dimensionality, we were also compelled to consider how poets use layers and relief, still versus moving images, and the space “outside the canvas/off the frame.” The following poetry selection allowed us to discuss a range of visual art tools at the poet’s disposal:

Self-Portrait Poems:

Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. Yvette Siegert, Extracting the Stone of Madness (New Directions, 2016)
Oliver de la Paz, “Diaspora Sonnet 42”
Sarina Romero, “At Newport Beach”
Terrance Hayes, “Wind in a Box”
Etel Adnan, “MY HOUSE MY CAT MY COMPANY”
From: In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (City Lights, 2005)

Perhaps the poem that most resembles a portrait in this selection is Oliver de la Paz’s “Diaspora Sonnet 42”. It gives us a strong central image: an agitated speaker with their elbow on the table, in hiding from noon’s sunshine and the heat outside. And it is outside that the focus shifts to leading us into the poem’s closure. The speaker overhears the “humid speech” of a group of dogs on the street; “Their deliberations about staying or going.” Here, what is happening off the frame sheds even more light on the portrait inside, and on the poem’s central question; the dogs are wondering whether to stay or go, while the central figure is caught in this enclosure—this moment of stasis.

Meanwhile, Sarina Romero’s “At Newport Beach” gives us the opportunity to consider composition—how separate elements of an artwork are arranged. The poem presents us with two different women: the speaker, and her father’s 18-year-old girlfriend. The presence of the odd couple is a vital element of the composition; they catalyze the speaker’s representation of herself. It is their physical intimacy that leaves her “needing something.” Romero’s stunning lines, “I put my ear to the sand / I needed something to measure,” gives us a poignant—and very visual—vignette of the speaker’s resentment, loneliness, and desperation.

When Nicole Sealey asks Terrance Hayes: “How should one be drawn?,” he says: “Variously.” In his poem, “Wind in a Box,” Hayes creates a collage of the self by way of an anaphora of desires. This anaphora becomes a collage, or a portrait-in-motion, as the speaker lists what they want and does not want to hold, do, or become, all the while invoking various objects and natural phenomena—even condiments: “I want the pepper’s fury / and the salt’s tenderness” Hayes writes. Instead of giving us one sustained image, Hayes packs the frame with profuse iterations of a future self, with love, wind, and change as the poem’s composite engine.

In Etel Adnan’s “MY HOUSE MY CAT MY COMPANY,” the self is portrayed principally through its interactions with other creatures—both living and nonliving. The parataxis here also manages to demonstrate a keen porosity between the self and everything around it; Adnan becomes the house—her eyes have “cruel particles of dust covering them,” as though they too were furniture. And elsewhere, Mao (the cat) becomes the speaker—the same terror that fills Adnan as she listens to the “lamentation” of the sunrise prayers is “communicated somehow to Mao whose hair stands up.” To read this piece as a self-portrait, one must also trace how Adnan portrays the objects and creatures around her.

Questions to consider while engaging Self-Portrait Poems:

How would you describe the composition of this poem?
What is happening outside the canvas/off the frame?
What is the relationship between the composition of the poem and its ending?
What is the central image in this poem?
Do you notice any static images? Any moving images?
How does the poet use light, dark, and shadow?
How does the poet bring texture, abstraction, or symbolism onto the page?
What metaphors/similes (about the body or the self) stand out to you?
What is the visual effect of the poem’s figurative language?
How does the poet place central themes into bas relief?
How are objects or natural phenomena portrayed in this poem? What is their relationship to the self?
What makes this poem a “self-portrait”?
What sets the poem apart from a self-portrait in a different medium?

Writing Prompt:

a. Draw your reflection in one continuous line. Don’t lift your pen, don’t look at the paper.

b. Looking only at your line drawing, write a self-portrait. Give it a title.

c. Under the title from the previous activity, write an anaphora of desires. (Begin every line with either “I want” or “I don’t want”.)

d. Around your previous draft, draw a frame/box. Write what’s happening outside the frame.

e. Looking at the drafts you have so far, write a self-portrait in two sections.

Suggested Self Portrait Poems:

Etel Adnan, “The morning after / my death”

Hala Alyan, “Honeymoon”

Dana Alsamsam, “Love Poem with Forgetting”

Leila Chatti, “Tea”

Natalie Diaz, “I, Minotaur”

Marissa Davis, “Psalm for the Unloved Body”

Safia Elhillo, “The Cairo Apartments”

Tarfia Faizullah, “Self-Portrait as Artemis”

Majda Gama, “In the City of Eve”

Kimiko Hahn, “The Dream of Shoji”

Terrance Hayes, “The Blue Terrance”

Ada Limón, “How most of the dreams go”

Iman Mersal, translated by Robyn Creswell, “A Grave I’m about to Dig”

Meghan O’Rourke, “Self-Portrait as Myself”

Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Patricio Ferrari and Forrest Gander, “[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.]”

Fairooz Tamimi, translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes, “Operating Manual: How to make a cup of hot chocolate”

Ocean Vuong, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong”