Poetry for Perspective-Taking

Curated by Tim Muehlhoff

Perspective-­taking is entering a person’s viewpoint to understand the moments or experiences that have shaped them. The ancient writer states that a person’s thoughts reside in “deep waters” (Proverbs 20:5 NIV). Poetry is a wonderful way to surface some of those thoughts that are often hard to put into prose. The following poems offer insights that allow us to understand or surface deep emotions. Equally important is what these poems surface in you as you read them. Some of these will provide insight, while others provoke.

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Do you wonder why a friend of yours seems to get easily defensive and often aggressively asserts their opinion? They simply won’t take no for an answer. What prompts that type of reaction? Philosopher Patrick Stokes defines narrative injury as a moment in a person’s life that sets it on a trajectory. Could it be possible that something happened early in your friend’s life that produced a deep regret, or narrative injury? Might it be something as simple as a tattered rabbit skin?

Rabbit Skin Pelt
Chris Davidson¹

I recalled for the therapist a rabbit skin I bought
At summer camp, at the camp trading post,
When I was nine or ten using cash my parents
Sent with me my first trip away from home.
I waited a long time to get the rabbit skin,
Waited in line a long time for the popular item,
The most popular item for sale, and in the rush
Once it was my turn I bought a rabbit skin
That was worn away in a not insignificant patch
I discovered later. I didn’t return it.
I should have known better. The therapist noted that:
That I said I should have known better.
That I recall it so vividly still, the rush I felt, feel still,
Of disappointment, wishing I’d done something then
About the defective thing I paid good money for,
Not wanting the other kids at camp to know it.
But you were nine, maybe ten, he said.
I was sitting on a large, cream-­colored couch.
My therapist sat across from me, a wall-­sized
Painting behind him that was either abstract or a picture
Of a desiccated city. I have never been able to tell.
How many rabbit skins had you bought before
You bought this one? Maybe all are worn away
Like this, maybe all were flawed when sold,
These pelts. You were nine or ten. It is okay
To know you shouldn’t have known better.

In today’s argument culture terms like my-­side bias and tribalism are used to describe our propensity to fanatically protect our convictions by associating only with those who see life as we do. Yet, what is the cost of so rigidly guarding our views? Does it, over time, cause us to see others in increasingly degrading ways and cause our words and breath to become hot? What cost or risk would there be in setting aside these watchmen long enough to ask questions of the other?

Guards and Neighbors
Philip Aijian²

God help me, good help is hard to find.
I have needed help for so long—
never strong enough to protect
what I love; so much to lose.
Wearied of trying and failing,
of rebuilding broken fences
I’ve hired some new guards
that with these days I might return
to plow and plant and harvest and laughter.
That with these days my sons and daughters
should face the night unafraid
hat they might wake to ravaged fields
or a vault pilfered of heirlooms.
Hold me not to approving all
these men do nor how. Hold me not
to loving their slurred vulgarities
or their smug blasphemies. I wince
and wince but pay their wages still
because I saw that if I paid them

(and I hope I’ve not paid too dear)
they would not hesitate to raise
their haughty knuckles along the borders
of my weakness. I listened and heard
their shouting louder than my own voice could ever be.
~ ~
Still, is this, at last, what comes of speaking
this way? Let me pause for a moment
and find some new (or old) use for the breath
that’s lately come so hot from my mouth.
Let us resolve, you and I, to ask a few more questions
however much I imagine I know the answers
already. And to ask them gently, followed
by no reply but long contemplation.
Plant your question in my wonder
and I will consider what blooms.
Release another like a scarlet tanager
and I promise I will watch its tumble
of singing colors in a sky whose season
and clouds will not be rushed for any price.
Maybe we will recognize each other
as the neighbors we were.
Maybe I will know my voice for my own
when again it speaks. And then I might
bring from behind my heart a precious thing,
and you your own. Shall I dare so much
to believe that you couldn’t
cherish a hope, a place,
a way of life
as much as I do?

After the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, people rediscovered Richard Wilbur’s poem as an alternative to violence. During the turbulent Vietnam War protests of the 1970s, students protesting military intervention asked Wilbur to support their anti-­war strike by writing a poem. Though sympathetic with their cause, he surprised the protesters by advocating for perspective-­taking with their most ardent opponents. While his suggestion to “stand on the stoops of their houses” and talk is great in theory, will we do it? Will we talk face-­to-­face with those whom we recently demonized on social media? His admonishment that it’s not yet time for “the bullet” is poignant in light of Kirk’s death.

For the Student Strikers

Richard Wilbur³

Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you,
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.
Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start,
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,
Changes of heart.
They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman’s son.

What can be done when you find yourself embroiled in a disagreement with a person where you are “stuck in a rudimentary pattern of defining yourself as opposites”? I don’t read your poets, and you don’t read mine. Transferring information only makes it worse and “toxic.” The ritual view of communication suggests we try to find something that we each value. Perhaps, a college graduation ceremony? Not celebrating the particular university, but the ritual of commencement itself? Could that help us put aside our differences for “one day of celebration” and see each other in a different light?

Higher Education

Jeffrey Harrison⁴

Antioch, Berkeley, and Columbia
were the ABC’s of colleges
my father said he wouldn’t pay for—
breeding grounds for radicalism
he called them, as if their campuses
were giant Petri dishes spawning
toxic cultures. Our own pathology
was pretty toxic at the time, both of us
stubbornly refusing to learn
anything about each other, or
about ourselves for that matter, stuck
in a rudimentary pattern of
defining ourselves as opposites.
I wouldn’t even look at Kenyon,
his beloved alma mater, despite
its long tradition as a school for
future poets. I hadn’t read a word
of Robert Lowell or James Wright yet,
but I’d read Ginsberg, and the first stop
on my college tour was Columbia,
and that’s where I ended up going.
And my father, to his credit, must
have seen it was the right place for me
or at least was unavoidable,
so he let me go, and he paid for it.
And the only price I had to pay
was, when I was home on holidays,
to suffer his barbed commentary
about the very education he
was financing, which ironically
had to do with the core values of
Western Civilization. I can’t
remember—is forgiveness one of them?
We both got a C in Forgiveness
but later bumped it up to a B minus
when, in a surprising twist, my son
ended up at Kenyon. My father
took real pleasure in that, though he
was already dying by then. I thought
of him at graduation, how proud
he would have been for his grandson
who, he might have joked, was a better
student than he had ever been—all
our ignorance put aside at least
for that one day of celebration.

1. Chris Davidson, Rabbit Skin Pelt, August 16, 2019, https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/rabbit-­skin-­pelt/. Chris Davidson is associate professor of English and director of the English Writing Program at Biola University. He teaches courses in critical thinking and writing, creative writing, and poetry. His essays and poetry have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman (Penguin, 2015); Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday, 2017); and Why To These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers (Heyday, 2021). He has published two chapbooks — Poems (Canvas Shop Press, 2012) and Easy Meal (Californios Press, 2020).

2. Philip Aijian earned his PhD in Renaissance drama and theology from the University of California at Irvine as well as a MA in poetry from the University of Missouri. He is a commissioned artist and poet, as well as an educator.
3. Richard Wilbur, “For the Student Strikers,” in The Mind-­Reader: New Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 31–32. Richard Wilbur is remembered as one of America’s most accomplished formal poets and won many awards for being a consummate wordsmith. In this poem, he breaks from his usual formality and rhyme to speak directly to students hungry for revolt and violence.
4. Jeffrey Harrison, “Higher Education” from Between Lakes: Poems. Copyright © 2020 by Jeffrey Harrison. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books, fourwaybooks.com. Jeffrey Harrison is the author of several collections of poetry, including Into Daylight (Tupelo, 2014), chosen by Tom Sleigh for the Dorset Prize and selected by the Massachusetts Center for the Book as a Must-­Read Book; Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, 2006), a runner-­up for the Poets’ Prize; Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001); and The Singing Underneath (E. P. Dutton, 1988), chosen by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series.