Marcus Wicker

A poem constructs its own speaker with consideration for the author but a healthy distance from him or her as direct influence. In a collection of poems, like Maybe the Saddest Thing, the speaker may change from poem to poem, but there is a unifying voice that seeks to discover different aspects of the same themes. Marcus Wicker explores the difficulty of the writer's mind in this collection, but it is in “I’m a Sad, Sad Man. So Sad.” that the speaker redirects the audience from reader to writer. First, Wicker explores the torment found in every writer. The speaker’s response to many of the incidents in this collection is to write. For example, in “Some Revisions” the poem ends, “I meant to say/ Write it. And please,/ don’t stop” (Wicker 32). The speaker imagines a situation on a bus in two different ways and uses the memory to address race. He calls himself to action at the end of the poem almost daring himself to overcome the difficulties of race to say something …show more content…
So Sad.” convey the compulsion of writing. The speaker’s pen begs for the chance to write, “Use me. Use them. Write/ their stories” (Wicker 41). The use of italics is to convey to the reader the internal dialogue of the speaker as a writer; they have a drive to craft stories from the inspiration around them. Wicker’s use of enjambment in ending the line with “Write,” allows the speaker to give himself and the reader a command. It is following this line that the speaker alienations part of the audience by claiming they not normal. The speaker states “And how sad/ it is, because I’m not really one of them” because of his compulsion to be unable to go “without thinking/ of narrative arc[s]” while doing mundane tasks (Wicker 42). While the speaker exposes that his internal self cannot engage in everyday activities as anything less than a writer, the use of “one of them” assumes that the reader is similar to the speaker, which suggests that they too are a