Assistant Editor Lily Meyer: In “I,” Kathleen Rooney jokes and plays with the letter I, turning it from a familiar vowel and pronoun to an object of linguistic wonder. In so doing, she undermines the self-involvement readers sometimes assume is common to first-person narrative: “I” is everywhere in this essay, but the speaker herself is hard to pin down.
To hear Kathleen read her essay, click below:
I
Who was the first person to call it the first person?
I for incomplete, a grade I never give.
In junior high I longed for a name with an i in it, thus to dot it with a heart or a smiley face.
First person, yes, but ninth letter of the alphabet.
i resist the childish preciousness of the lowercase i
On the other hand, I like that in ASL the letter I is rendered with the pinkie.
Who will be the last person to remain alive? Not I, I hope.
I is the easiest of Roman numerals. I get confused by L and C and D and M, and I am not alone. My high-school economics teacher told us that Hollywood studios put copyright dates in Roman numerals so audiences couldn’t tell how much the movies were aging. I have no idea if this is true; the guy was prone to saying whatever crap happened to flit into his mind.
Pronoun for the person speaking or writing: I am here. Or I was. Don’t I wish.
O vowel of opinion, powerfully expressed! I tell you what. I’m not mistaken, am I?
IMHO, sweetened breakfast cereals should be regulated as controlled substances. Cap’n Crunch is 44.4 percent sugar. Ay yai yai.
My nine-year-old niece has the periodic table memorized. I think I’d be impressed even if she were in no way mine. I is for Iodine on the periodic table, atomic number 53, its name derived from the Greek iodes, meaning violet. Intense concentration in her violet eyes.
I ask you: why do you think Apple puts i in front of everything? Don’t Google, I want your answer on the fly.
Ay me! Sometimes a turn of events is so bad, you need an archaic expression of surprise or misery.
What’s your favorite interstate highway? Me, I’m partial to I-95.
An imaginary number is a complex number that can be written as a real number multiplied by the imaginary unit i. René Descartes coined the term and meant it derogatorily, but I guess they showed him!
I like when artists can speak of their work with accurate vanity. Joni Mitchell said, “My music is not designed to grab instantly. It’s designed to wear for a lifetime, to hold up like a fine cloth.”
Action is the antidote for guilt, I agree, but what the heck am I supposed to do?
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. She’s the author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin, 2020). She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.
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