The Daily Glance
Elizabeth Robinson's Also Known As is a exploration of persona. She alerts us to this in a note in which she states that she had Pessoa in mind with this book and that she "undertook to write in the persona of an author who was himself writing under the guise of multiple personae." The note conditioned my reading of the book, for I doubt that I would have thought of the multiple persona idea without the title and the note, but once there, I looked for traces of it in the book, and it is easy to see diverse voices emerging in the text. Since the book consists of lyrics, this question complicates the typically simple view of seeing the I as somehow more truthful than the second-hand observer. Are we reading a perspective here? Is this showing how perspective is constructed? Is Robinson inhabiting another perspective in writing the poems as we do as readers when we read them?
Whatever answers one comes up with to these questions, one can still enjoy the collection on its own, for the writing works outside of the book's context.
Overnight, I chose to become a hunchback.
I take seriously the adage
that everything is connected
and so I have attached myself more
to myself.
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