Welcome to my page!
Here is my poets statement:
My favorite Poem: Change in color (Based on sunsets)
I watch as people lay on a sandy beach to watch me My pink and orange fades behind the ocean Just like all their worries do I watch the girl with light brown freckles on her face Forget the heartbreak Of seeing her true love with another girl As her last tear rolls down her cheek I watch the old man Holding a faded red rose Looking past me to the heavens Whimpering words to me Just like their worries I can appear at any point throughout the day I can go away as quick as quicksand Or fade away lightly I’m that light that shines before things go dark And even though I don’t last forever I’ll be back the next day to make it all better When I return and see my reflection In your clear eyes I realize that the worries have subsided So as things begin to get dark just remember one thing I will return and don’t you forget it. |
Poetry is much more than writing a story or writing lines that rhyme. I always thought a poem was just a haiku or sonnet, but I was wrong.
There are multiple types of poetry like found poems, persona poems, ekphrastic poem, and more. Some people might ask, then what is a poem? A poem is a piece of writing that can express emotion, senses and much more. It’s being able to express yourself in a creative way. Things like music lyrics can be seen as poetic because the artist is expressing themselves in a creative and imaginative way. Poems come in many different forms such as traditional and experimental, organic which breaks lines wherever, and hybrid poems which can look like paragraphs. To have a good poem as the poet it is my job to know these types of poems and how to write them. For a poem to have emotion and senses it needs to be able to show it rather than say it. Like in the reading “Who’s Afraid of the big bad Abstractions,” by David Jauss he uses the example instead of saying “I felt depressed,” say “ I lay there in bed in a peaceful form of depression,” (Jauss 75). The readers are more likely able to picture the second sentence in their head rather than just someone being depressed. By just saying someone is depressed the readers can picture it in multiple different ways and that can affect the poem. Poems are often rhythmical and are often in a stanzaic structure. They include metaphors, images, similes, parallelism and more. One thing I look at when writing a poem is content and form or rhetoric. Content is what the poem says, for example “tears are like rain”. Form or rhetoric is how the poem says it, for example “tears are like rain” is a simile. Another thing I think about when writing a poem is if the poem is too abstract. As a poet I want my poem to be more concrete and fresh. This means the arrangement of words are just as important in showing the meaning of the poem as the elements of the poem are. The elements would be things like the meaning of words, rhythm, metaphors, and so on. As a poet to have a good poem I want my poems to not have abstractions. As in the reading “Who’s Afraid of the big bad Abstraction,” by David Jauss, abstractions are words that name emotions and tell the reader what the emotion is rather then expressing it. I don’t want to use this as a poet. I want the readers to be able to feel the emotion and visualize it, rather than say he is happy, or he is sad. This is something that I struggled with in the beginning. I would always tell the emotions I wanted the readers to know because I was afraid they wouldn’t understand it if I showed it. Though from this reading I learned that everyone feels differently and I can’t tell the readers how to feel, I just need to trust that they will understand it. Another issue I and other poets can have is describing something in the poem in detail and then summing it up. In the reading “Who’s Afraid of the big bad Abstraction,” by David Jauss, this called glossing. It’s another thing I began to do whenever I described something and thought it was too confusing for the reader. I remember when I first wrote my found poems I would describe in images that they were in love but that I would say “because she loved him.” For example one of my lines from my found poem “Underneath it all,” originally was “Our hands fitting together like two people in love.” I was showing the readers what was happening and then telling them why. I then had to go back and change it so it was just showing the emotion and I was able to change it to “Our hands fitting perfectly as they intertwined.” This line gives a better image to the reader then the first one does and allows them to see the love rather than having me tell them. It’s not good to use this when writing a poem because it means I am telling the reader what it is they are supposed to be feeling rather than letting them feel what they want. Images, similes, and metaphors are other things that help make a poem good. A reading that helped me realize this was “The Poets Companion reading about Similes and Metaphors”. By using similes and metaphors, I am putting things into relation to other things. For similes you are calling attention to itself by using like or as. A metaphor is a more personal experience and uses things called vehicle and tenor. Using images, similes, and metaphors help the poem have less abstractions. These are tools that can help me get my emotion across in a way the reader can understand and picture in their head. Lastly another thing that makes a poem good is sentence structure. We learned a lot about sentence structure in the reading “The Geography of Sentences,” by Emily Brisse. When we discussed sentences in class I learned that there are four types of sentences. There are simple sentences, left-branching sentences, right-branching sentences, and periodic sentences. A simple sentence has a subject plus a verb, like my brother ran. A left-branching sentence has branches to the left, whereas the right-branching sentences have branches to the right. Finally a periodic sentence splits the subject and verb. As a poet I can do this by adding an appositive, adjective, verbals, verbs, or adverbs. By using this I’m making the sentence more interesting and it can help grab the reader’s attention. For my poems to be good I want them to leave the reader wanting more or to leave them thinking “wow this was written really well.” For this to happen my sentence structures need not only to flow but they need to make scene ad be interesting. Like Emily Brisse said it’s important to “focus first on shape and then symbol.” Meaning I first need to see how my poem is structured. It’s also important to use short and long sentences. According to Emily Brisse it is better to use short sentences because they add texture rather than long sentences which can get confusing. Short sentences also have more impact than long ones do because they get right to the point. There will be times when I will write a line in a poem and I add to much detail making it a long sentence. It is my job as the poet to go back and think if maybe that line would have more impact and meaning if it was a shorter sentence. I can definitely say that I have grown as a writer. I’ve gone from knowing very little about poetry to being proud of the poems I’ve written. As a poet I tend to write about romantic, positive, subject matters. Things like love stories or people succeeding in life interest me. I enjoy writing about people falling in love for the first time or even a romantic moment between two people. Love is such a powerful emotion that everyone can feel it differently and I believe that’s what makes it so unique. I often use images about the stars and sun when I explain love or how love is being expressed. When using images that are common you need to make sure to use that image in a way that isn’t cliché. Most of my writing is written in a traditional form. I usually tend to have four to five lines per stanza and I don’t have any crazy line breaks. I personally don’t like when lines are all over the place, for example: Having one line here And another here Then back here Poems about love are passionate and intimate so the line’s and line breaks should flow and not be all over the place. As you can see from one of my favorite poems above, the stanzas aren’t very long and I show love, through the sunset. The sun takes time to set but not long and that’s why I feel having not too long stanzas fits with the idea of the sunset. Even though the sunset see’s the worries people are having it still is showing them that it loves them and will help them. I loved the idea of writing a poem from a sunset’s point of view and am glad that I was able to put everything I learned into making a poem I can be proud of. |