Poetry Tips: An Outside Perspective

Many poets, myself included, tend to write poems from only one perspective: their own. They write about their lives, their view out the window, their own objects and family and friends. Sometimes it is good to take a look at things from someone else’s perspective, or even something. For example, if you were to write about the view from the window, why not write it from your pet’s perspective? How might an ant crawling across the carpet to your cabinet door view things?
Or, you can write about events outside of your immediate control. You could write about the wars in other countries, marketplaces in other countries, the sights and smells of a safari you’ve never been on. Perhaps you can write from the perspective of a person in office, a person with short term memory loss, someone with paralysis, someone with mental illness such as Schizophrenia. The idea is to literally set yourself in another pair of shoes and walk it for an entire length of a poem.

Good luck and may there be no writer’s block on your paths of writing…