February Column

(Published in The Evening Sun on February 28, 2010)

While growing up, whenever we went on a trip, my family was sure to pack a copy of the “Merchandiser,” so we could take a picture reading it in a new place and send it back to the publication. Essentially, this ritual was a practice in perspective. Reading the same publication in different places surely changes the way you interpret the text. In the spirit of the “Merchandiser” photographs, I challenge you to think more deeply about perspective and its connection to reading and writing this month. Whether you travel to Antarctica or walk to the other side of the hall, your perspective changes.

For a writer, this change helps to build a body of work. Perspective is the hammer in a poet’s toolbelt. It helps a writer reach beneath the surface of an idea and taps into the depth and layers a poet loves to work with. For me, perspective is invaluable. It has influenced the voice, style, and content of my poems and inspired my first book manuscript.

I experienced the power of perspective first-hand. After growing up on a farm in Hanover and attending college in rural Virginia, I decided to pursue an MFA in Poetry in Chicago. At the time, I did not realize how much this move from country to city, East Coast to Midwest, would influence my work. However, living in this new, urban environment, I was suddenly able to write about the country, a topic I had barely scratched the surface of while living on the farm. Poems set in Hanover began to pour from my consciousness. At first this did not make sense to me, not until I understood the gifts perspective brings.

The main reason for this new ability was distance to reflect and think. I could now see my experiences at an arm’s length and write about them without my present location raising blinders. Suddenly, I was in a world where people do not fill their freezers with their own home-grown vegetables and pasture-raised steers, where the scent of horse manure is absent, and where cement replaces fields. In the absence of these expectations, each detail of the country stood out more starkly than before.

After the shock of these contrasts set in, and I began to write more about the country, I then began to notice connections. Before I knew it, I was traveling on the bus past the projects and making connections to home, to farm life. I know that this does not sound reasonable, but it happened. The most amazing connection I made was that people in the most rural and urban areas share a sense of grit. People know what it means to work hard and live off instinct. This epiphany led me to work on my first book manuscript, titled “Grit,” which takes the reader through my transition from country to city.

Perspective certainly comes with travel and distance. However, it can also appear when one is open to possibilities. The more ways you look at a situation or object, the more deeply you understand it. Wallace Stevens, a Modern poet, illustrates this well in his study, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In each stanza of the poem, he considers the blackbird in a different way.

Stevens opens the poem with:

"Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird."

His first study of the blackbird emphasizes perspective. He looks at this enormous, white landscape of “twenty. . .mountains”; yet, only the eye of the blackbird, the most minute detail, moves. In the fifth stanza, he continues:

"I do not know which to prefer—
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after."

Here the study submerges itself in ideology, as he ponders which perspective he likes better: the song or the moment after the song. The poem continues on for thirteen stanzas, each giving a different perspective of the blackbird. Stevens ends the poem with:

"It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs."

In this study of the blackbird, Stevens cues in on the blackbird’s alienation amid this winter storm and the seemingly never-ending night. Think of how different it would be to read this poem in the summer than during the blizzard we just experienced. This is the power of perspective.

Here is my challenge to you: Log onto my blog, http://poetlaureatehanover.blogspot.com, and post a photograph of yourself reading or writing in a particular place. Then, write a caption about how perspective informs your understanding of the text. I also hope this will inspire “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a _____” poems. Feel free to send them to me!