Prompt: Ways of Looking

In the early-career Wallace Stevens poem, ''Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,'' the reader is presented with something seen from different perspectives. Perception is subjective, so these short stanzas shift and evolve but are not directly connected, other than by their subject. Each haiku-like stanza is its own way of looking at the blackbird.

Two selections from Jane Kenyon's poem "Three Songs at the End of Summer" illustrate how her poem also looks (in 12 small stanzas divided into 3 sections/songs) at something more abstract from different perspectives.

A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket....

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.

Is Stevens' blackbird a symbol? Its color might suggest mystery. Its appearance in the poem shows a kind of interconnectedness as it separate from and also part of nature. If it is a symbol of the world itself, it can represent the complexity of our perception. Stevens gives us the bird in the natural world (a bird in the snow) to the psychological (a man mistaking a shadow for a blackbird).

What is the "correct" way to perceive the blackbird or reality? Of course, there isn't one way because our understanding of the world is shaped by our individual perspective.

In your poem, be attentive to the details of your subject and its surroundings. Present multiple interpretations without a need to select one as correct. You need not have 13 ways - though many 13 ways parodies of Stevens' poem have been written. You could have as few as two ways of seeing. Your subject can be a thing (a river, a painting), a person (a lover, a baby), a scene (a baseball game, a thunderstorm) or something we can't literally see (terror, jealousy, the end of summer).

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