The Gold Key
Why Use Fairy Tales in Poetry? Or—Why I Have Used Fairy Tales in My Poetry
- All poetry is metaphor, so you have to decide what you are going to use to convey that comparison: As a poet, you are saying, This experience I’m having or had is similar to this other thing.
- Using fairy tales as that “thing” to tap into a different level of consciousness is transformative.
- Fairy tales, like classical myth, are dramatic and flawed, and any aspect of real life that uses them as a metaphor tends to be amplified by the timelessness of the problems the poem conveys.
- Fairy tale allusions immediately transport the reader to childhood, which not only helps to provide nostalgia, it also suggests, once again, that the thing you’re describing is deep seated and rooted in the very nexus of our origins, is something that is either a universal archetype floating through the cosmos and a part of all of us or is something that one learns very young and perhaps even in infancy.
- Fairy tales connect us to each other because they are among the most commonly known tales in our culture and are often how we first learn about the world.
- Because society and most people's world views have changed so completely throughout history, and because fairy tales represent the societies of their writers (the Grimm brothers: 19th century Germany, Charles Perrault: 17th century France, Giambattista Basile: 17th century Italy, Hans Christian Andersen: 19th century Denmark, Andrew Lang: 19th century Scotland, etc.) and the much more ancient folk cultures from which they stem, there are ample changes to be made. Making these changes not only better reflects contemporary ways of thinking, the contrast in the older and newer world views emphasizes the importance of the changes that have taken place in the intervening years.
Some History of Fairy Tale Allusions in Poetry
Using fairy tales in poetry is nothing new, but we can thank the second wave feminists for a surge of poetry relating or alluding to fairy tales in the 1960s and 1970s. These feminists looked at fairy tales and the fact that they were largely still being read to children and molding the way children think and realized the ideas espoused in the narratives no longer fit the time period. In Marcia K. Leiberman's 1972 essay, “’Some Day My Prince Will Come:’ Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale,” she points out that most heroines of classic fairy tales have the following qualities: they are passive, they are always the most beautiful woman in their tale, they are often unintelligent, and they are always the youngest woman in their tale. Leiberman makes the argument that fairy tales acculturate their readers to believing the most important qualities a woman can possess are beauty and youth and that women should be passive and submissive and wait to be rescued by their "princes." Backlash to the ideas conveyed to girls in fairy tales started being represented in poetry, and perhaps the most well-known example of this is Anne Sexton's 1971 poetry collection, Transformations.
Maxine Kumin says of Anne Sexton, “above all else, she was attracted to the fairy tales of Anderson and Grimm, which her beloved Nana had read to her when she was a child. They were for her, perhaps, what Bible stories and Greek myths had been for other writers” (xxviii).
Transformations, by Anne Sexton
Maxine Kumin says of Anne Sexton, “above all else, she was attracted to the fairy tales of Anderson and Grimm, which her beloved Nana had read to her when she was a child. They were for her, perhaps, what Bible stories and Greek myths had been for other writers” (xxviii).
Transformations, by Anne Sexton
- retells fairy tales but using a modern world and modern concerns.
- presents the experiences of women and women writers
- is autobiographical
- suggests the power of the female writer.
- suggests strength comes from writing and from carrying on a tradition of female storytellers.
- begins with an invitation to the reader to re-enter childhood and the world of fairy tales: The Gold Key
Examples of Fairy Tales in Contemporary Poetry
"Cinderella," by Olga Broumas
"Snow White Turns 39," by Anne Sheldon
"Wolf," by Carina Bissett
"Rapunzel," by David Trinidad
"Snow White: The Prince," by Alice Friman
"Snow White Turns 39," by Anne Sheldon
"Wolf," by Carina Bissett
"Rapunzel," by David Trinidad
"Snow White: The Prince," by Alice Friman
How to Revisit and Revise Fairy Tales in Poetry
- There are countless ways to use fairy tales in poetry, from using a single allusion to a fairy tale in a poem to carrying a fairy tale motif throughout a poem to completely rewriting a fairy tale in poetic form. And there are countless ways to go about each of these methods. I tend to gravitate toward the second method, but I have certainly done the first and appreciated the second in others' works.
- One of the most common ways to use a classic fairy tale in a poem is to write a Persona Poem or, what is sometimes called a Character Voice Poem, in which you lose yourself in a character (in this case, a fairy tale character). To do this, you take on the persona or the character of someone else and speak in that character's voice, using the first person. Persona poems work best when the reader is aware from the beginning that this is a persona (rather than the writer) speaking, so using a fairy tale character (a character that is easily identifiable from the beginning) usually works well for a Persona Poem. The character doesn't even have to be human. You might choose to speak from the voice of a dog, a bird, an insect, or an inanimate object like a plant or a chair in the fairy tale. The main point is that once you pick this person/thing, you must decide what this character's voice would be like. In other words, you must decide what diction and syntax would be appropriate for this person/thing and what this entity's innermost emotions, anxieties, and tribulations would be. Sometimes, however, you might put contemporary diction on a fairy tale character to make a statement about the change in times, etc., but whichever way you go, your diction and syntax should be consistent throughout the poem, and your purpose in choosing that diction and syntax should be clear. Here is an example of a pretty straight-foward persona poem based on a fairy that I wrote many years ago. In fact, I believe it was the first fairy tale revision poem I ever wrote:
Wicked Stepsister Two Speaks
to a Brother Grimm
If I asked you
to take me out of this place,
this space she has left,
I suppose you wouldn't.
But I see dragons at night.
They dip and sway past my window.
And shivers, I get shivers, cold sweats.
I dream of marrying trolls.
I wash my own
underwear, tend my own fires.
Sometimes
I hear the clip-clop
of the Prince's carriage--
It is always the rain.
Going to market is such
a hassle, mixing among
the common, half of them opium
junkies, and after cutting off
my heel to spite my stepsister,
I can't bear the pain.
I suppose you love
her to make her young and
beautiful and perfect. I suppose
you hate me to make me wicked
and lame. But you created me,
and now you must whisk
me away on your white horse
or quill pen, erase what I
have done here, wash my blood
out of her shoe.
- Whenever using fairy tales in poetry (or any reference to a well-known story) surprise your reader in some way. Don't just re-tell a story that everyone already knows. Poetry should illuminate, so try to reveal something interesting or unusual. Tell the part of the story that hasn't been told or tell it from a perspective from which it hasn't been told before.
- Consider focusing on a character who is not the main character in the original tale. This is what I did in "Wicked Stepsister." Along with giving readers a part of the story that is a surprise, it gives readers a different perspective of the same story they think they know so well. Also, many times, as in this case, the idea of perspective is part of the point. "Wicked Stepsister" is a poem for the outsider, the one left behind, and while Cinderella has always been portrayed as the outsider in the home of her stepmother and stepsisters, in the world of fairy tales, she is the beautiful heroine who triumphs over her wicked step-family. But what are the so-called "wicked" family members' stories? Why are they the way they are? Wicked stepsister two, in particular, seems to have the least choice in being labeled as evil, as a product of both her mother and her older sister before her.
- Be as specific as possible. Details are the lifeblood of good poetry to me, and you have the added advantage in dealing with fairy tales that classic ones tend to be rather vague. Just adding details that are specific helps to surprise and delight the reader because it is something he or she hasn't seen before in regard to the tale. Ex: "Gretel," by Mary Jo Bang
- Do some research. Use the internet to find terms that someone in your speaker's or your main character's position might use, or, if appropriate, information about this person's job or household. You want to seem as authentic as possible, and these techniques will help your poem to sound interesting, not using the same run-of-the-mill words or information that everyone knows.
The House Began to Pitch
In Oz, the little people huddle.
There is no moon.
Dorothy is gone. Glinda has floated away
inside a ball of sunshine.
A house is left
broken and flaky in the middle of red pansies.
Purple gladiolas as large as trumpets
sing as the Lollipop Guild raids the kitchen,
gathers milk and cookies for Sleepyheads.
The carpenters lift the foundation,
coroner pulls out the shriveled corpse
of a wicked witch.
They are free.
The Lullaby League grabs linens
from beds to sepulcher
the remains, and the council meets
inside city hall to choose
a proper resting place. Sepia-cloaked Kansas
is mentioned and quickly discarded.
No one knows the way.
Perhaps, the mayor of Emerald City
should officiate, call Dorothy, the national heroine,
back to eulogize, but a heroine should not
be bothered with trivialities.
Munchkins stroke their chins;
the body emits a fetid odor,
green, bright, and heavy in the sky.
Families shutter the cottage windows;
yellow brick turns sickly lime;
the brook is contaminated.
So the little men dig, sink the body into a plot
on the outskirts of town, build a yellow brick monument
and as time passes, wait for another day so vivid
a gray clapboard house can twist
into a rainbow,
a prison prism, release
a tiny people--oppressed
as night in technicolor.
- At the same time, avoid sounding like an encyclopedia entry. Try using metaphor, personification, alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme (not end-rhyme) (You don't have to use all of these, but try to use some of them).
- Title: If writing a persona poem, name who the person/entity is in your title! Your poem is not meant to be a riddle. The fascination is not in creating a voice so that the reader has to try to figure out who it is. The reader should know who it is in the beginning. The fascination should be in the interesting outlook this speaker has and the interesting way this speaker has of saying it or perhaps the poem is telling us a side to this person's life we didn't know.
- Use the fairy tale as a means of addressing a bigger message, one about discrimination, cruelty, feminism, the nature of love, envy, the superficial world, aging, appearances versus reality, or any bigger issue to which you can connect the fairy tale.
The Tin Man
At ten years old, my brother lay in an iron lung, fighting polio,
dreaming of sardines and silos, ovens,
and those mechanical banks that look like clowns or jesters eating
the coins you slip through their jaws, and once, he became the tin man
taking a journey with his motley faction of misfits, chasing
a yellow road up the buckle of sun-lit peaks, tramping down
valley and down valley to a bruised bank of swamp weed that laced
their shins, that left marks. In the dream, they struck ocean, they whistled
to silence of the ground, they wasted their movements,
the lion’s sinews bulging, the hay man rolling on the wind like
a tumble weed, and the girl—clicking and clicking with each skip.
They watched movement ripple. They watched it crest. He didn’t dream
of his destination. He dreamed of his friends loping through forests, of squirrels
that romped over branches, that disappeared into the inertia of solid trunks,
and of himself, wielding that heavy, woodsman’s axe
just to chop those suckers down.
A few other fairy tale inspired poems: "Christopher Robin Returns to the Hundred Acre Wood" and "Swans and Mosquitoes"