A cautionary reminder.

The speaker in a story or poem may or may not be the author.

The first person singular is particularly deceptive. When I tell you MY story, you, the reader, respond to ME personally, directly. I’VE set up the relationship and given YOU YOUR secondary role as recipient.

The natural response is usually easy and immediate. “When I was young and foolish.” Ah, yes, youth.

The author could have been a little old lady of eighty, but that wouldn’t matter, because the person in the poem is speaking and that’s who we’re dealing with, whose voice we hear.

Sometimes it’s a shock when we meet the author, maybe at a reading, and he isn’t at all like the person we’ve been reading for years. “I thought you were younger, that you’d be taller, better looking, not so fat.”

The person who produces the words can be a rock star on paper, and it may be better never to see them in person if it shatters the illusion.

It reminds me of the movie I saw somewhere, the camera contrasting the speaker and the listener in a phone sex conversation. The listener is a young man, eager, drooling, squirming in his chair as the girl’s voice tells him, “Ooo, Ooo, don’t stop!”

Then the camera shifts to a room of fat old women smoking cigarettes, each on the line to a client, saying in a high young voice, “Ooo, Yes! Yes!”