Thursday, January 3, 2013

Finding Your Angle

If 10 poets are looking at a woman sitting on a bus bench.....

The exact same woman, and then Finley takes these 10 poets to the Dublinger...........

And everybody sidles up to the bar..............

Then the bartender pours this crew not 1, not 2....but 3 beers........each

And all of a sudden, out of nowhere.....tablets and pens are produced........

 Then Finley hops on top of the bar, stomps his feet and says..............

"I want each of you to please write a poem about that women on the bus we passed."

I wonder, would all these poets write similar poems.

Of course we'll never know the answer, but every once in awhile I run across a work that is written from a P.O.V. that simply blows me away.

EXAMPLE -

Ms. Szymborska “looks at things from an angle you would never think of looking at for yourself in a million years,” Dr. Cavanagh said on the day of the Nobel announcement. She pointed to “one stunning poem that’s a eulogy.”
“It’s about the death of someone close to her that’s done from the point of view of the person’s cat,” she said.
That poem, “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” as translated by Dr. Cavanagh and Mr. Baranczak, opens:
Die — You can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.
Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.
Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should. Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared. 

-   END   -

For once I'm going to shut up, I going to hold back opinions, I want to hear from you....the seasoned poets, do you, should one...try to find different branches in the tree to sit on when writing a poem?

1 comment:

  1. And your answer must be from the point of view of a pet...

    I think most of us write from our own beleaguered point of view, because that is how we're puzzling things out. How can you describe that woman except from what she stirred in you, sitting on the bench? The question to me always is, how do you make that sketch a good one, one that express both your experience and something that everyone can sign on to? The more you write about a thing, the more likely it is you will stumble, quite accidentally, on this universal idea. Then you clear away all the clutter around it.

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