I’ve always had a complicated relationship with poetry. I emotionally connect more to stories and characters rather than imagery and figurative language, so I’ve always gravitated to fiction instead of poetry. I liked the occasional sonnet here or limerick there, but for pretty much all of high-school, poetry was a slog. It wasn’t until a good way into my time in college that my perspective began to shift. I had a class on Modernism that spent a nearly a month going over T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, and I started to see how you can put so much emotional power into a small amount of words.
A few semesters later, I saw a slot was open for a poetry workshop course. While I knew poetry was the great unknown for me as a writer, I decided to take on the challenge. Below are several of the poems I wrote, all of which have been peer-reviewed, workshopped, and revised.
The prompt for the last poem of the course was to write around five hundred words of prose and whittle it down to a small poem with intentional language and line-breaks. I decided to write about a question that plagued me a lot as a kid, and still struggle with from time to time as an adult.
For this poem we had to teach our audience how to do something. With my many years working at a grocery store, I saw an opportunity to express some common frustrations, but with a more satirical twist.
I have the type of personality that, if I’m not careful, can easily fall into addiction; it’s the part of me that frightens me the most. The prompt for this poem was a list of around ten words we had to incorporate (25 points to Gryffindor if you can guess which are the ten words). When I read the list, I knew this was the poem I had to write.
I was probably most intimidated by this prompt. We had to scour the web for a work of art we resonated with and use it as our seed. I have a hard time connecting to poetry…let alone art. Luckily, I stumbled upon Toxicity by Samuel Levi Jones and found a story to tell.
The challenge for this poem was to listen to conversations or sounds around you and find a creative seed. While at a party, several of us were throwing knives and hatchets at a wooden target. When something bounced off, it had a very particular, hollow tone that made me think of how, at least for me, a mistake can linger in your head, especially in the wee hours of the night.
While this was the first poem I wrote in the course (not going to lie, it was a little rough), I was so happy with the revision that it still earned its place here. While we did not have a specific prompt, I wanted to make sure I had enough emotional distance to accept criticism gracefully. This is actually the story of a friend of mine who went through an on-again-off-again relationship for a year.
