Point: a spatial metaphor. Imagine the person (poet or narrator of the poem) as a camera placed here or there, recording only the images visible from that spot. This may mean, besides physical placement, placement in an unfolding story (in time, in a social situation), in a developing argument (in an intellectual context), and (most difficult to distinguish from tone or mood) in a psychic landscape. Even in the trickiest of abstract circumstances, the essence of point of view is the relationship between a person and a set of circumstances.
Note the change in point of view between these two stanzas, and again in the second:
How Western Underwear Came to Japan
When Tokyo’s Shirokiya Drygoods caught fire
in the thirties, shopgirls tore the shelves’ kimonos
and knotted them in ropes. Older women used
both hands, descending safely from the highest floors
though their underskirts flew up around their hips.
The crowded street saw everything beneath—
ankles, knees, the purple flanges of their sex.
Versus the younger girls’ careful keeping
one hand pinned against their skirts, against
the nothing below and their silk falling.
-Lucia Perillo
Or the dream-like shifting of point of view in the following poem:
After the Attack
The sick boy.
Locked in a vision
with tongue stiff as a horn.
He sits with his back towards the painting of a wheatfield.
The bandage around his jaw reminds one of an embalming.
His spectacles are thick as a diver’s. Nothing has any answer
and is sudden as a telephone ringing in the night.
But the painting there. It is a landscape that makes one feel peaceful even though the wheat
is a golden storm.
Blue, fiery blue sky and driving clouds. Beneath in the yellow waves
some white shirts are sailing: threshers—they cast no shadow.
At the far end of the field a man seems to be looking this way. A broad hat leaves his face
in shadow.
He seems to look at the dark shape in the room here, as though to help.
Gradually the painting begins to stretch and open behind the boy who is sick
and sunk in himself. It throws sparks and makes noise. Every wheathead throws off light
as if to wake him up!
The other man—in the wheat—makes a sign.
He has come nearer.
No one notices it.
-Tomas Tranströmer
ASSIGNMENT POV
1. Pick an event, or a scene (real or imagined) that interests you with its dramatic possibilities.
2. Keep it simple (a child falling off a jungle gym breaks her arm, an old man and old woman sitting in silence on a porch, a body in a morgue stirs).
3. Investigate the event or the scene from different points of view (from inside the characters, from the eye of a fly-on-the-wall, from within the mind of an omniscient narrator, from the vantage point of an uninterested bystander or that of an interested voyeur).
4. Use at least two different points of view in the composition of your poem. You can separate them by stanza or numbered section like Perillo, or integrate them within the body of the poem like Tranströmer.
This is an assignment about generation. Get down on paper too much information, and then winnow it back to what most interests you. How the different points of view play off one another will create energy and tension in your poem. The two (or more) points of view needn’t be oppositional to do so. Slight changes in perspective can be thought-provoking. The Law & Order franchise created decades of successful shows by utilizing just this tool. Not to mention CSI. How does shifting your point of view affect you as the writer? Can you learn more about the event you’ve chosen to illuminate by working in this way? Or do you just elaborate upon what you knew about the scene from the onset? Discovery works differently for different people. After you’ve completed this assignment, reflect on how these limitations did or did not work for you.
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