Looking at the body of work I had written over the course of the semester, I noticed a real and noticeable shift in my approach to writing as I progressed. While I do think a lot of poetry can come from intuition and inspiration, learning to familiarize myself with poetry as a craft has allowed me a lot more control, intentionality, and freedom with my work. Here, you’ll find instances of me working within my familiarity as well as creating with the intention of trying something new.
Part of this shift was embracing revision. Much of my revisions focused on line breaks and line length. Shifting small line breaks made big differences in “Getting Sober” and “The Morticican.” Those poems are dense with loaded words and enjambing on more powerful words emphasized the tension of those poems. There were also instances where I enjambed lines to preserve a poem’s shape. This can also be seen in “Getting Sober” where a few of the lines’ lengths were distractingly longer than the rest and cumbersome to read, throwing off the poem’s rhythm. Similarly, I edited the formatting of “a poem without metaphor” to make the white space more intentional, like interrupting thoughts that jut into real life moments.
Something else I worked on was trope. I wanted to tighten up my usage of tropes like metaphors, epic similes, and personification in multiple poems. For example, in “reflections,” the personification of wind felt flat, and almost cliche. I opted to create the scene by elaborating on other images, leaving the wind as it was, almost unfinished. In “the lights never turned off in the waiting room,” I sharpened the light motif a little more, focusing the poem to take place in the hospital. I narrowed the association of eternal light with the dissonance it had with death and returned to the idea of artificial lighting of waiting rooms. Similarly, “The Mortician” features a long metaphor, comparing someone letting go of love to a mortician or embalmer. I kept the focus on this comparison more, and lingered on the image of the mortician, rather than spraying the reader in a different direction.
In addition to noticing a stark progression from how I was writing before and after, I’ve noticed common threads in the themes that I write about. Throughout my pieces, there are threads of love, loss, and memory; the fragility of our lives that hang between those things. While ordering my poems, I did not imagine a linear narrative, but I tried to allow the poems to be in conversation with each other. A part of my decision making was purely aesthetic choices– not wanting similar-looking poems to follow each other, and wanting to stagger poem lengths. I think that placing short poems between long ones allows for a breath in the reading, and feels more natural and dynamic, the way speech should have pauses.
I also thought about content. I fought the compulsion to make one of my poems with strong themes or mentions of death the last poem. I knew I wanted “a poem without metaphor” to be last. To me, that poem is a reflection on poetry, and a looking back on my writing. It’s unlike any of the other poems I’ve written in form, content, and tone. This, to me, is a culmination of my work, and stepping back to look at it. I also wanted to make sure the first poem did not have a sense of finality to it, so that the rest of the poems could follow. I chose “swimming pools” as my first poem as a bittersweet opening about dipping into memory. The last lines, “we keep on playing them out. / we keep on playing them out.” felt like an opening. With the poems in the middle, I tried to “cushion” the heavier poems about loss with the others. I didn’t want the collection to just be about loss or culminate into loss. I wanted the poems to speak for themselves, too.
Lastly, I think it’s important to note that I made all these decisions without any real conviction that I knew what I was doing. This made the process uncertain, but exciting, to try things to see if there’s a different outcome. It will always be interesting to me that poetry really is subjective. That any combination or string of words, lines, stanzas, can be valid, strike a chord, or fall flat. It makes reading poetry endlessly interesting, and being a poet even more interesting.