Learning to Read

To understand “Learning to Read,” readers need to understand the persona poem. When utilizing the persona poem form, writers construct a character separate from their usual authorial voice to narrate the poem. Persona relies heavily on characterization: the art of using context, actions, and details to define a character’s personality, values, and goals.

Writers build a fictional character or evoke a pre-existing figure for their personas. Pre-existing figures can include historical or contemporary people and characters from earlier stories and mythologies. Typically, persona poems can be a useful rhetorical device for poets.

Through the form, writers can draw parallels between themselves and the persona, thus getting at issues challenging to express directly. Alternatively, persona poems expose and contextualize particular worldviews or hold a mirror up towards the reader and society. Writers can collage a series of persona poems with a single speaker or many different ones to capture a larger story in poetry collections. Persona poems reveal contrasts and similarities between people or even add a sense of authority to a poet’s message.

Persona poetry as a technique to establish authority is especially pertinent to Watkins Harper’s construction of “Learning to Read.” As a Black woman born free, Watkins Harper never personally experienced slavery.