Through this project I learned a lot, about myself and about poetry. Before this project, I hadn’t written very much poetry, often leaning more towards short stories, which was part of the reason that I chose to do a project on poetry in the first place. This year, I also participated in the Poetry Club, from which many of these poems were inspired. But the two poems that I did not write for the club are the two I am most proud of.
I’ve always been a fairly good assembler of words, but my problem with my writing has been that it is very difficult for me to come up with my own ideas. I have done most of my writing from prompts for school assignments, or created plotlines inspired by something popular at the time. I’ve tried to create things that are entirely original, but they often still have some underlying similarity to something else.
Words and poSSeSSiveneSS were both completely original. I wrote them on different nights, both of them at work while on a lunch period sitting down in our calm cool-colored Marketplace Café area, Words done on the back of my pay stub and poSSeSSiveneSS scribbled first on some leftover notepaper in my pocketbook. They were inspired by events or emotions that I was dealing with in my life at the time, and were written mostly to put some kind of face or explanation to that thing, and were completely unprompted. Because of this, I am most proud of them, because I feel that the best work of the best writers are completely unprompted by anyone other than themselves. A good writer takes an idea, subject or emotion that is prevalent in their times, like George Orwell’s theme based on communism in Animal Farm or Kate Chopin’s essays and stories on developing feminism, and turns it into something that the world can read and digest so that they can go change things for the better.
All of my other poems were written based on prompts for my Poetry Club. Night was written to experiment with rhyme scheme, which was abcac. I chose the topic of 'the night-life of forest animals' because I wanted to try and use imagery to paint that picture. The Looking-Glass was about a hand-held mirror that we have that's been passed down from my great-great grandmother; it's silver in color, and faded, and has the image of a woman on the back, which is partially why I gave the mirror a female gender. Gor was written to personify fear. I also specifically tried to use alot of imagery in this poem, becuase I wanted to give the reader both the feeling of disgust and complete helplessness and lack of control you can feel when attacked by fear. My Heart was written shortly after a break-up, and describes the immediate heartbreak and lonliness you can feel when something you thought you cared about dissapears, and the final stanza describes the attempt to move on and continue with you life. Storm was in the form of Shakespearean Sonnet, and that was the reason it was written; to write a Sonnet. I chose the theme of a tugboat capsizing accidentally; I wrote the first stanza, 'The ocean breeze so gently strokes my cheek. /Warm dampened sand morphes in between my toes. /Wave-battered boardwalk stands firm in the wake, /A brewing storm; dark sky; baleful wind blows.' I started describing the scene as peaceful, and I wanted to include sensory aspect, such as sand between one's toes, and an old, wave-battered boardwalk, then I began describing a storm and the violent scene surrounding the persona in the story. I then re-read the stanza, and changed 'gently' in the first stanza to 'harshly' to continue with the scene of the viscious storm.
I really enjoyed doing my graduation project, and I’m really glad that I chose this topic and idea because I learned so much from it that I wouldn’t have gotten out of my classes, but if I am to pursue a future in writing, these were things I needed to learn.
