Telling the Truth Slant: Assuming Different Characters

In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 284. 

We often assume the speaker in a poem is the poet and that what is revealed in the poem is autobiographical. But is it always? Does it matter? 

Let’s go back to Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—” poem and the line, “Success in Circuit lies” to understand how to write a poem slant. To tell the truth, not only must we take the circuitous route, or the indirect path, but we must also tease out the truth, even fictionalize, exaggerate, invent, massage, and take a side glance to get us to the truth’s superb surprise. If truth is delivered too directly, it won’t, in essence, be felt. We can reveal a truth in a poem by telling another’s story, within which lies our own. 

Let’s look at a poem by Sandra Lim called “Jean Rhys.” Here, the poet embodies ideas of a biographical figure, that of the writer Jean Rhys, who in her novels wrote about female despair. Here’s how Lim arrives at a truth slant. 

“Jean Rhys”

It’s now within
an hour of sundown of a late
November afternoon.

It was a beautiful day,
the cold burned
down any indignation.

What won’t degrade:
the sick and distant, or near and black,
bad-natured tides of want.

Jean Rhys is saying
If  I could jump out of the window
One bang and I’d be out of  it.

It isn’t done
to admit to this kind
of  need,

but spirit needs a house,
and the brief pageant of  being
escorted through

the grieving joy of words
set down right. The cold bores her,
oppresses her. Life

comes to bore her. She can strip 
a thing down. I want 
beauty, she adds. Hear me?

I hear you, Jean. Yours is a voice
disabused; and inside the cold of  it,
there’s a sort of festival.

Is it possible to find joy in agony? In feeling too much? Can that site of despair be a festival? This poem begs the question: How does the writer, as Vivian Gornick says in her landmark work, The Situation and the Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), “pull from his or her own boring, agitated self the truth speaker who will tell the story that needs to be told”? In this case, Lim finds the truth speaker in Jean Rhys. Jean Rhys’s novels often explore the lives of destitute women who are lonely and hopeless. In this poem, Lim subverts the notion of despair into its own kind of ironic celebration and community. The bang, if you will, the telling detail, comes in the lines: 

It isn’t done
to admit to this kind of need,

And yet, Lin admits this need, gets us there in the poem, because just as a “spirit needs a house,” a truth needs a poem to hold it.

In Lim’s poem, we see a poet approaching her central subject while also moving away from it, simultaneously revealing and redirecting our focus. We are allowed to let our minds dwell, to take in the poem’s sometimes unconscious strategy, even as we approach the poet’s truth, the speaker’s truth, through another figure. This method allows the poem to eventually be imbued with the thing that it signifies, whether joy, loss, grief, horror, despair, or suffering. The reader can gain subliminal knowledge which is felt more than stated.

I take this route in my poem “Jane Austen,” which I selected from my volume The Players (Knopf, 2015) and is now in Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems.

“Jane Austen”

“A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming day it is.” —Northanger Abbey

I awoke from the tunnel
to the fields of yellow rape,
seventeenth-century buildings, and cobbled
streets as she would have seen them.
It was rainy; the rain came and went,
came and went so that you could not escape
its dampness. I understood the need for tea
and the luxury of cremes and pastries
and why the ladies longed for a strong shoulder
to see them through the winter.
The seagulls cried overhead,
though there was no sea, only a muddy river
from Bath to Bristol. The scavengers
lived on the rooftops and if desperate
enough would swoop down and take
a sandwich from your hand.
I secured my room at the Royal Bath Hotel.
It was a hovel, really, with a carpet
as old as the early century.
Walking through the hotel,
I sensed something lurid
in the air, every eye upon me as if they knew
I was a foreigner in a strange land.
Over the bed, a burgundy bedspread
dusty and faded as vintage wine,
made me long for the bright color of red.
In the next room, sleepless, I heard
through thin walls the sounds
of an un-tender coupling.
I looked in the warped mirror
and found myself ugly
and when I turned from it,
could not escape the vision.
It lingered. The rain came and went,
came and went. I took an umbrella
and began my walk, hoping to come upon
her quarters. I passed the Roman Baths,
the statues not beautiful,
but puckered and fossilled
and the Pump Room where her protagonist,
other self, doppelgänger,
good, strong, loyal Catherine,
longing for companionship, fell
under the seduction of Isabella
and her reprehensible brother.
Even then her coming out
seemed less magisterial,
and Bath a representation of the emptiness
and evils of society where a woman’s dowry
might confine her forever,
than a reprieve from country life.
I gave up my search.
Images were everywhere.
And my mind had been made up.
I perceived no romance
in the wind, no comfort in the hard
glances of strangers, girls with chipped nail polish,
lads unkempt as if there were no hope of glory.
The next morning I boarded the train
to the modern world and it wasn’t until a sheet
of blue slipped out like a love letter
from its envelope of dark gray sky
that I knew the journey had ended
and, like Catherine, I was finally safe.

This poem grew out of an actual experience of visiting Bath and being reminded of Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, which is set in part there. I didn’t know, when I began this poem, what I might discover; was it a mood, a feeling, an idea I was after? I’m not sure. But my impulse was to embody what I imagined Austen and her character, Catherine, embodied and hence whatever truth I might uncover in doing so. As an exercise, why not write a poem about one of your favorite writers and their work, and by telling it slant, see what emerges.

Jill Bialosky is the author of six collections of poetry including Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2026). Her book Asylum (Knopf, 2020) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and she is the author of the memoir Poetry Will Save Your Life (Atria Books, 2017). She is an executive editor and vice president at W. W. Norton.