Free Thought

Today I was thinking about how where you live deeply affects your poetry. When I was reading our packet, I was amazed at the difference you could feel in the tones of Ali's poems and other poems in the packet. You can see this a lot in poetry. Of course it is a no-brainier that people of different background are going to write differently, but I have been thinking about it. Sometimes in a poem, you write for a speaker that is not yourself. Would you ever really be able to write a poem in the eyes of someone who has a very different life experiences? I have seen some novelist, like Wally Lamb, do a great job at writing from a females perspective, and visa-versa, but what about a different culture? Just some things I have been thinking about, especially with a culture that is very different from our own.