I believe in the power of empathy, the ability to put oneself in another person’s shoes without having to necessarily agree with her or him. I believe that seeing the world through another person’s eyes forges an inner shift towards an ever-expanding movement and that poetry, too, can precipitate such change.
I drew this diagram years ago for a class I was teaching at Walnut Creek, California. I called it the Shift-Circle. It begins small, like a pebble dropped in a boundless pond. The first circle is miniscule but it sets in motion ripples of ever-expanding breadth. I suppose I would need a physicist to draw it for me properly. However, here it is as a one-dimensional drawing.
You can enter the cycle at any point and begin a journey that appears to be circular but is in fact ever expanding and never the same in content or depth. Movement leads to a shift in perspective, which leads to empathy. Empathy is an agent of change. If you enter at a moment where a shift in perspective is taking place, then you continue your journey to the next step, which is empathy, and from there, to change, which creates movement towards another shift in perspective. By that point you have created and moved into the next layer of ripples.
Similarly, a poem begins with that first pebble in the water. It creates the first circle at any of the points the poem enters: change, movement, shift in perspective, or empathy. The circle must be completed before the poem can continue to the next level.
An exercise: Take a favorite poem and ask at which point does it enter the Shift-Circle? Does it complete the first round, and if so, does it move on to the next rung of the ripple?
Comments