Someday I'll Love by: Ocean Vuong. This poem serves as a memoir of sorts for Vuong. Knowing the life story of Vuong is almost essential in understanding this poem. He addresses very specific memories from his life, but does so in an ambiguous way. Lines like, "...no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement." and "Don't be afraid, the gunfire is only the sound of people trying to live a little longer and failing." are about Vuong's experience being born in Vietnam, and explain a little of why he left. Not many people will be able to relate to these lines, especially cause some of them address the writers name directly, but that isn't entirely the goal, instead they give the audience a glimpse into the writer's real life.
The speakers perspective being so obviously the writer's in these two poems made me think about perspective in general. We talked about this earlier in the semester talking about how men used to write poems from the perspective of Mary. This then made me think about the poems we read that are quite obviously not written from the writers perspective.
The Little Black Boy by: William Blake. Pretty much any poem from Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" fit into this category of clearly not being written from the firsthand perspective of the writer. Most of the poems in this collection are from the perspective of children, and for most there is a matching poem with the opposite perspective.
Obviously Blake isn't a girl, or Black, or a child, so perspective is something that he really played with in this collection. I picked "The Little Black Boy" specifically because it does not have a matching poem, which makes it seem like Black kids are not equal to white kids. We discussed in class whether or not it is problematic for poets to write from a perspective they cannot relate to, and the general consensus was it's okay as long as it isn't harmful. I would say this poem is an example of one of the ones that is harmful. Creatively it is cruel to say writing from another perspective is discriminatory; but this poem serves as the reason some people are bothered by it.
Further thinking about perspective, the poem "To the Young Who Want to Die" by Gwendolyn Brooks openly shows her trying to think from another perspective, and in a less problematic way. In Blake's collection, you wouldn't know it wasn't written by a little girl for example because he doesn't write it as such. But in this Brooks poem, she is proposing ideas for how someone with a different perspective could think to help themselves. The poem is from Brooks point of view, but it is about how she thinks another perspective should think.