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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38981
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 **Audiences always confuse the author with the narrator** , and your chosen format makes this particularly difficult. Slam poetry is typically confessional in nature, which means that your audience is even more predisposed to view you as speaking for yourself.

Being completely honest, I wouldn't even try this in this format, personally. But the larger question is a good one. I'm facing a similar issue myself, since the first-person narrator of my new book is racist --unintentionally, and without malice, but clearly racist. Here are my suggestions:

- **Add another voice to interrogate your character's positions**. In your format, you could make this poem a dialogue between two different voices. In my book, I've made sure that there are other characters who identify and call out my MC's prejudices.

- **Allow your character to evolve**. Maybe your character's perspective changes over the course of the text. This is tricky to pull off without it seeming forced, but it can be extremely effective if done well.

- **Tone it down a little**. This might seem like betraying your character, or being unrealistic, but you have to remember that realism is just a technique. It doesn't take that much to clearly imply noxious views for a character, and a more full rendering can be unpleasant or distressing to the audience, which is probably not what you want. For my book, I had to ask myself if I would feel comfortable reading my own book to my children. I ended up cutting a couple of particularly egregious passages.

- **Allow yourself a little distance from the character**. Again, this may seem like a betrayal of your artistic commitments, but look at it from the viewpoint of connecting with the audience. What they currently think they are experiencing is a bigot spewing bile at them. _They can't enjoy that as art._ They'll be able to appreciate this character more as a character. This might be something as simple as a one line intro: "So I was talking to my neighbor, old lady Henderson, and she says:" and then you launch into your poem. You can still do your best to depict her from her point of view, but now the audience knows it isn't you. 
- **Interrogate your own choice to present this work in this fashion.** You may not have any conscious agreement with these views. But have you really put yourself in the place of someone in the audience who might feel targeted by them? To quote transgressive comedian Sarah Silverman, talking about her own early work: 

> Just cos I am liberal and I say I’m making a character study of an ignorant person – the intention was good, but whatever. Now I know more about this phrase ‘the liberal bubble’, I know that saying ‘I’m not racist, so I can be racist to show racism’… well social media taught me that racism doesn’t need me to help people understand racism, because it’s everywhere.
> 
> [https://www.theguardian.com/global/2017/nov/19/sarah-silverman-interview-jokes-i-made-15-years-ago-i-wouldnt-make-today](https://www.theguardian.com/global/2017/nov/19/sarah-silverman-interview-jokes-i-made-15-years-ago-i-wouldnt-make-today)

Original score: 7