Writing my poetry collection was not
the easiest thing I've ever done. It wasn't exactly the hardest, but it got a
little tedious.
My first poem was called Winter's
Ward. This one was actually the easiest one for me. It was kind of
weird, I was sitting and I couldn't think of anything to write about and then
all of a sudden the idea popped up in my head. Out of nowhere. I can't even
remember what I was thinking about before I thought of it. A poem about someone
describing a scene that resembles a cold winter but really, this person is in a
straight-jacket in one of those white padded rooms. I wasn't actually sure if
those kinds of rooms existed or if they still use straight-jackets but it seemed
like something I had seen in a movie. I decided to write it as a sonnet because
I find it's much easier to write a poem if there's a specific structure to
follow. I actually think I did quite well on this poem. I like to think that
I'm pretty good at counting to ten, so it wasn't too hard to keep all of my
syllables within limit. Although, I do think that when I was writing it I
should have been thinking about the meter, as the Iambic Pentameter doesn't
actually work for the whole poem. I think this poem came as a pleasant
surprise, because the rest of my poems did not come as easily.
My next poems were a set of three
Haiku's. I'm not going to lie, I really had no idea what I was doing with these
ones. I didn't want to waste more time than I already had, spending hours
thinking of a really good idea so I would just go along with the first thing
that came to mind, in hopes that I could somehow turn them in to something. The
titles are: Katrina, Chicken Eat Chicken, and Blindfolds. Again,
I think I got the structure of the haiku pretty well. However, I still didn't
pay enough attention to a metre. Having written these poems, I was really
just hoping that anyone who read it would kind of just make their own
interpretation. Like, "Oh, is this about hurricane Katrina?" or
"Is he a chicken?" things like that. For anyone who ever reads them
under the impression that they are supposed to be linked together, I apologize
in advance. They really aren't that meaningful. But hey, at least it made you
think.
Oh, the dreaded Character poem.
This is the poem I spent the longest on. It is also my very least favourite
poem out of the entire collection. I dislike it more than the Haiku's that I
don't even understand. It wasn't writing it that took a long time, it was
choosing a character and figuring out what a character poem even was. For some
reason, I just really had a hard time wrapping my head around how to write this
poem. I started with Baby Bear from Goldilocks and the Three Bears, to one of
Cinderella's stepsisters and then after a whole night of trying to figure this
out, I ended up choosing Arista; some random sister of Ariel's from The Little
Mermaid that nobody even knows. I think it was that with the character poem, it
doesn't have a structure, or specific amount of syllables for me to follow. As
I was writing this "Arista" poem, it didn't even feel
like I was writing a poem. It really just felt like I was some jealous sister
ranting in my journal. I think the reason I struggled with this poem so much
was because I just really didn't like what I was writing. So basically, there
really isn't anything about this poem that stands out to me. I did notice that
used parallelism for three lines and short sentences but other than that, I'm
just glad that I didn't end with that poem.
My final poem of the collection was a Sound poem. I chose the title Running
Out. Probably because I was literally running out of time with this
poetry collection, but also because everyone knows that I generally have a
little thing with time. So for this poem, since I was aiming for sound and
there's no specific syllable count, I wrote the lines saying them out loud. As
far as rhyme, it followed an a,b,a,b rhyme scheme except for the first
stanza.
In the end, I of course wasn't completely satisfied with the poems I had formed
into a collection. Like everything else I've written in this course. However, I
am impressed with that weird metaphor thing that I came up with, with the cold
winter representing the insane asylum. So there's that.
There was a certain charisma about her as she'd wander around the room and the way she'd whisper certain words as she read us parts of her novel. I also thought it was sad that she had only those few photos of her childhood, because these days you have albums and albums filled, stashed away in your basement. Or at least my family does. But I guess it also makes them more special, and also it's a lot easier to manage them. As in, you don't have to ransack your basement just to find a picture of yourself at age 3, eating a popsicle.
