{"id":125,"date":"2021-10-11T23:24:23","date_gmt":"2021-10-11T23:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/?page_id=125"},"modified":"2021-12-08T18:17:22","modified_gmt":"2021-12-08T18:17:22","slug":"poetry","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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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<\/em>, and I started to see how you can put so much emotional power into a small amount of words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When people ask why I’m quiet<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Guide to Grocery Shopping<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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ode to addiction<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Security<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a><\/em><\/span> by Samuel Levi Jones and found a story to tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Type-A Night-Time Terrors<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Long-Distance Fluctuations<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-125","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":263,"href":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/125\/revisions\/263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartyslayfast.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}