point of view

the worm’s eye point of view

coupled with the diagonal tree trunk

lend spying power to this portrait

by Boris Kulikov

Point of View

illustrator: Karolina Kucharski

Here In The Psalm

by Sally Fisher

I am a sheep
and I like it
because the grass
I lie down in
feels good and the still
waters are restful and right
there if I’m thirsty
and though some valleys
are very chilly there is a long
rod that prods me so I
direct my hooves
the right way
though today
I’m trying hard
to sit at a table
because it’s expected
required really
and my enemies—
it turns out I have enemies—
are watching me eat and
spill my drink
but I don’t worry because
all my enemies do
is watch and I know
I’m safe if I will
just do my best
as I sit on this chair
that wobbles a bit
in the grass
on the side of a hill.

“Here In The Psalm” by Sally Fisher from Good Question. © Bright Hills Press, 2016.

Try rewriting a psalm from the fish’s point of view!

Here in the Psalm (2)

I am a goldfish
and I l like it
because the bowl
I swim in
is cool and clear
and the sights
are friendly and homey
and food
drifts down
to sustain me
and though some humans
have no scales
their big eyes glow like mine
and the enemy cat
is mostly polite
as my fins
swirl me round
out of harms way
as I munch greens
and balance my
flippers underneath
the canopy of
the sunlit living room.

Point of View

2012

.

Father and son stare

at light-highlights-living eyes

of loved ones cherished.

Definition #139 (Jeanne from Queens #11) emotions

Doesn’t everyone dress in gold in 1977?

Tom Wolfe:

In an essay published in 2007, Tom Wolfe argued that the newspaper industry would stand a much better chance of survival if newspaper editors encouraged reporters to “provide the emotional reality of the news, for it is the emotions, not the facts, that most engage and excite readers and in the end are the heart of most stories.”

He said there are exactly four technical devices needed to get to “the emotional core of the story.” They are the specific devices, he said, “that give fiction its absorbing or gripping quality, that make the reader feel present in the scene described and even inside the skin of a particular character.”

The four:

1) constructing scenes;

2) dialogue — lots of it;

3) carefully noting social status details — “everything from dress and furniture to the infinite status clues of speech, how one talks to superiors or inferiors … and with what sort of accent and vocabulary”; and

4) point of view, “in the Henry Jamesian sense of putting the reader inside the mind of someone other than the writer.”