The Practice of Poetry

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I have always been cautious of the tourist’s gaze; writing about new, exotic, foreign things is a dangerous endeavor. The tourist’s gaze is the gaze of the outsider. Yet sometimes, the outsider’s gaze is exactly what is needed.

It seems like a very basic concept that we need new perspectives to keep our ideas flowing. The average sandwich is re-invented fairly regularly: the classic grilled cheese sandwich morphed into a “panini” and recently, it was reintroduced as a “flat-iron sandwich.” Papayas strike my fancy because I don’t eat them as often as bananas. So, slight variations can shift the angle just enough to give us a new perspective, or a new appetite.

Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil for years, yet much of her work still focused on the sturdy, northern landscape of her childhood. She had a pet toucan, but I can’t remember any poems of hers that include toucans. She thrived in the tropics, but she didn’t overuse it in her writing. I often wonder if this was an intentional avoidance on her part–a shtick she didn’t want to take up.

Must we avoid the tourist poems altogether for fear of a naive poem? Or alternatively, how do we switch to the outsider perspective in our own cities, communities, or homes so that we can find inspiration in the common day? Traveling to Greece to eke out a new piece of writing is cost-prohibitive, especially with the oil crisis.

If we can hold both the outsider and insider perspective simultaneously we have a much broader and deeper perception. It is a balancing act, a teeter-totter between being fully intimate with a subject and knowing it from the inside, and being separated enough to see with unblurred scrutiny.

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