I've already written a post about my thoughts on poetry, so I'm going to try to avoid redundancy as much as possible. I regret not being able to explore different kinds of poetry in this unit. Poetry is difficult to learn and study because there is dissonance between every poet's voice. Finding your own voice in poetry is a challenge. It would have been nice to be able to explore different voices of different poets. In my English class in middle school, our teacher made us write down why we wrote. I wrote, "I write to discover". And that's always been the most important thing to me. It's more important to be able phrase my thoughts and learn from what I'm writing than to produce a final product that mirrors the example but isn't mine in heart. I really hope that my final poem reflected something of actual importance from me to the reader.
For me, the hardest part of the poem was coming up with an idea and sticking with it. I'm a very impatient person. So when I get stuck, I tend to just give up. I don't let people look through my sketchbook because so much of it is filled with just half finished drawings I've given up on. I considered writing about a multitude of ideas and even wrote a couple horribly vague, disconnected poems. But I didn't like the direction any of my poems were going in. Once I finished my poem, I forced myself to continue to push it to the best it could be.
But for something that's supposed to be specific, the editing process was incredibly intricate. Every single detail had to be modified in some way, and as a closeted perfectionist that really frustrated me. Some sections I ended up completely deleting because I had to come to terms with the fact they just didn't make sense.
When it came to working on holding a moment, I created a method that worked for me. I was struggling with elaboration. I like to write in ways that allow the reader to be able to interpret my work in whatever way would be most applicable to them. So, I drew exactly what I had written in the poem. If I couldn't draw a decent sketch using the details I used, I had to add more details. If there was an empty space, I had to draw something and describe it. If I had a detail that didn't fit, I had to manipulate it until it did.
All in all, I really like poetry. Poetry forces us to write in a balance between something that's real and brutally honest and something thats creative and imaginative.
