I will be the first to admit that I am not the biggest fan of writing poetry. I love reading it, for the most part, but I find the writing process to be long and difficult when you are trying to stay away from the clichés. What helped me somewhat stay away from that was when we were assigned to think of random moments in our lives that meant something to us, but we don't exactly know why.
This part came generally easy to me. The first things that came to my head were pretty random, but a few of the moments were obvious and, well, cliché; Christmas eve, Thanksgiving dinners, my sisters leaving for college, all of the moments that you would expect to stick in someone's mind. I finally settled on when my ex-boyfriend and I walked through the woods together. Nothing exciting happened (so no one get any ideas), but it was special and I felt as though writing a poem about it would allow me to dive deeper into why this stuck.
When I wrote my first draft, my ex-boyfriend and I were more recently broken up than we are now, so I had many more emotions that came easily to me as I wrote the poem. Looking back, though, I realize that I left most of those out of the poem. My poem was pure detail and story, it had no feeling showing through it even though there was a lot behind it.
In the second draft, I allowed more emotions to show but still subconsciously held back. I kept getting feedback to dive deeper into what happened between the two people in the poem, but I was afraid to for reasons that will remain unsaid. When we got our poems back again and were told to rewrite them a third and final time, I'll admit I got angry. I was told again to go deeper into their problem and this time I was consciously holding back. This anger let my emotions finally break through and go onto my paper. He wanted to go deeper into the problem? Fine. Here it is. And let me say, it was amazing. I hated doing it so much. I hated having to connect with what was bothering me and find a way to make it sound "pretty." But it worked. It got the feelings out of me. The situation still upsets me, but it's nice to know that I finally got it off my chest and into writing.
I didn't care for this writing process at all, but looking back, I know that it was good for me and I thoroughly appreciate it now.
No comments:
Post a Comment