Writing Prompt: "Dear Diary," and the Voice of Authority

Writing prompt inspired by the poem "Dear Diary," by Adele Elise Williams

by Abena Ntoso

This summer, I had the opportunity to hear Adele Elise Williams read from her award-winning debut collection Wager in a seminar at the University of Houston. Selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, Wager showcases Williams’s distinct voice, candid and humble yet unapologetically feminist and courageous. William’s voice reminds me of Diane Seuss—frank and down-to-earth. Williams’s poems establish the speaker as the voice of authority on her own life, and as such, we sense a truth that resonates beyond her life to sound on gender, poverty, addiction and reclamation.

The idea of the “voice of authority” in a poem comes from Carl Dennis, who explains in the opening of Poetry as Persuasion that the persuasiveness of a poem “depends on the presence of a definite speaker with a sharply defined point of view,” yet “we want our poetic voices to show us that they don’t claim to know all things, that they realize that all efforts to tell the truth are more likely to be expressions of the particular needs of the truth-seeker than revelations of the real nature of the world” (15). In other words, we are wary of poems that purport to represent voices beyond that of the speaker or that profess universality. We are more likely to believe in a poem in which the speaker has a well-defined perspective yet also makes it clear that the truth contained in the poem reflects the speaker’s unique needs. Such is the voice of authority of which Dennis speaks, and in the passage below (featuring my annotations) Dennis outlines the requirements for a speaker’s voice to have authority:

Thus, the voice of authority is one that reflects the triad of passion (caring about the topic), discrimination (commitment to examining other positions), and inclusiveness (connection between immediate subject and broader issues).

One of my favorite poems in Wager is “Dear Diary,” in which Williams uses the form of a diary entry as an ideal structure for the speaker’s unabashed thoughts. Personal diaries are perhaps one of the most nonjudgmental and unstructured outlets for writing, and the form serves as the perfect structural metaphor to showcase the frankness and associative movement that characterizes the poem. 

In particular, Williams’s choice in form helps to establish the speaker in this poem as a “voice of authority.” The speaker’s passion is evident in the associative movement which begins in the opening line: “Astronomers have successfully photographed a black hole, and I am getting older.” Here Williams uses a compound sentence to link two seemingly unrelated ideas; the two declarative clauses in the sentence establish what the speaker knows, linking an awareness of the universe to an awareness of the self. A succession of thoughts then flows with free association that reveals the passion of the speaker’s voice simply because we get the sense that the speaker’s thoughts are authentic.

The speaker’s discrimination, or commitment to examining other ideas, is revealed in the juxtapositions between the speaker’s reflections on herself versus her observations of herself within social contexts. The humility and candor in lines like “my sexy body is less sexy, when my / face puckers like pocket tissue and when my legs are sleepy and pale” contrasts with the self-empowerment of lines such as “I am tired of holding my shoulders like a woman with big breasts.” which rejects the sexualization of women’s bodies by a society that equates bustiness with beauty. Both lines work together to produce a keen self-awareness, producing a sincerity that comes from recognizing the multiple ways in which she views her body.

Finally, the speaker’s inclusiveness, or connections between immediate and broader issues, is conveyed in lines such as the italicized “Sometimes being poor feels worse than being a woman.” This line sits between the speaker’s recounting of her experiences in her “fem theory course,” echoing the dynamic established in the opening line as the speaker links her awareness of a broader issue with an awareness of her own self and the life experiences that connect her to the issue of poverty and gender inequality.

Thinking of one's voice in terms of passion, discrimination, and inclusiveness helps establish a speaker whose personal truths resonate with readers simply because they are coming from a desire to reflect on her own unique experiences and examine them in relation to the world around her and the broader social issues.

Prompt:

1. Begin with a sentence that links two seemingly unrelated ideas, especially one that is external to the self and one that is personal.

2. Continue as though you are writing a diary entry, using free association to move through thoughts while also returning to one or both ideas from the opening sentence. How do these ideas interact? What ideas and images can you juxtapose? How do they combine with other thoughts and observations to bring forth new ideas and insights? Allow the balance between associative flow and thematic return to eventually move you toward a new insight by the end of the piece.   

December 19, 2024