Growth as a Poet Reflection
In this project, I was attempting to express a trend of emotions and thoughts that I had been experiencing over the past year. This trend continued to be hard for me to define in words throughout the project, but looking through the drafts of my poem, I realize that my poem and the perspective it presents did grow and improve. When I wrote the very first draft, I could not even describe to myself what I wanted to say, I just needed to express it. I became frustrated with myself, so I decided to try to do it piece by piece, and settled with a poem that I knew did not really have a message but was filled with beautiful imagery. Basically, it described a girl waking up to the early morning in a sleeping house built on a mountainside, and how she watches the morning unfold. The last two lines were: “Each golden green leaf on every knotted branch attached to every giant tree glows./A new day.” This poem emphasized the idea of a new day, and what that meant. However, I wasn’t sure that was the message I wanted it to have. I was also unsatisfied because it was so vague that, after reading it, there would be a good chance that the reader would still have no idea what exactly I wanted to express. My final draft definitely was more clear. In the process between the two drafts, I decided that I wanted to articulate my struggle to find and maintain balance in my life between moments of negativity and moments filled with a clear, positive understanding of myself. In the final draft of my poem, I describe the struggle between negativity and positivity, especially in the lines, “In the shadowed corner of the mind,/doubt suffocating, circling,/leering down at you, your small self/then,/inspiration./The cloudy corner illuminated…”. These lines communicate the doubt I felt concerning who I was, what that meant, and my limitations when I describe doubt leering at my ‘small self’. The other side, positivity, is also represented when inspiration illuminates the cloudy corner in which the negative thoughts were first born. Over this process, the perspective of my poem has become more and more direct and true to who I am and what I want to say.
Part of what I originally aimed to communicate was general feelings of discontent I was experiencing, specifically doubt and anxiety about who I was and how my future would unfold. In the third draft, I attempted to express this discontent in two short lines: "Every day, following the routine/Drifting between proud and green". The first line represented the anxiety I felt about the repetitiveness of my life then, but it was confusing because my anxiety about this was not emphasized enough. By "Drifting between proud and green" I described how my emotions were constantly fluctuating between either proud, inconsiderate and too comfortable or feeling insecure and envious of other people. The word 'green' in this line represented envy. While that concept made sense, the word ‘green’ muddled it because readers did not always understand that I was using ‘green’ as it is used in the expression ‘green with envy’. This part of the third draft was not as powerful as I wanted it to be, so I added more lines that were more expressive and meaningful. I replaced it with this: “Emotions drifting between two shores: pride and envy./In the shadowed corner of the mind,/doubt suffocating, circling,/leering down at you, your small self/then,/inspiration.” I kept the idea of emotions swinging between pride and envy, but it became more direct and I brought in a metaphor, comparing my emotions to waves between those two shores. The lines afterwards communicated my angst with personification that then contrasted with the turn in the last line. I think that this change depicted a more complex portrayal of my emotions, and added more substance and meaning to my poem.
When I was creating my final draft, I decided to add more to the last verse of my poem. Originally in my third draft, this verse consisted of five rhyming lines, “But when you look to the sky/You see the golden rain falling, so shy/You feel the caress of light breathing life/Into your body.” The problem with this verse was that it didn’t convey positive emotions to the extent that I wanted it to. My poem was about finding balance between positivity and negativity, which meant that both the positive and negative sections needed to be equal. The verse before the last focused on negativity and was larger, so I decided I needed to refine and increase the last verse. It became this: “You see the golden rain falling, barely a sound/It tickles your fingertips, soaks your skin,/A whisper of misty energy running through your body/You feel the caress of light breathing life/Into you.” In this new version, I bring back imagery of water that I used at the beginning. I think that it creates the impression on the reader that this positivity, or hope, is both a physical and mental experience. Emotionally, it is meant to evoke an all encompassing feeling of relief and optimism, by causing the reader to imagine moisture soaking into their skin and energy revitalizing them while they watch luminescent rain fall from the sky. That is my exact idea of an experience that would improve my perspective and help me up no matter what.
The final change that was most essential to improving my poem is my revision of the very last line: “You see the golden rain, and/you can/finally/breathe.” In the beginning, this line was: “You see the rain, and you know why.” Both versions of this line were based on the same essential idea, which was the fleeting feeling I have sometimes where I feel some small understanding of why everything is as it is. The first version of the line was too vague, and addressed a question that hadn’t been introduced in the poem before. I was aiming to have that line be a reference to the overarching question of ‘Why?’, but in the end there was a more clear and elegant way to say a similar thing. When I feel like I have a grasp of joy because at that moment everything is going right, a weight is lifted off my chest and the relief is tangible. ‘Seeing’ the golden rain represents anything that inspires hope in me, making me feel light enough to really breathe deeply and feel air flow through my body. The second version of this line is multifaceted in that it covers all of the different ways this emotion manifests itself in my mind and physically in my body, much more so than the first line did.
Part of what I originally aimed to communicate was general feelings of discontent I was experiencing, specifically doubt and anxiety about who I was and how my future would unfold. In the third draft, I attempted to express this discontent in two short lines: "Every day, following the routine/Drifting between proud and green". The first line represented the anxiety I felt about the repetitiveness of my life then, but it was confusing because my anxiety about this was not emphasized enough. By "Drifting between proud and green" I described how my emotions were constantly fluctuating between either proud, inconsiderate and too comfortable or feeling insecure and envious of other people. The word 'green' in this line represented envy. While that concept made sense, the word ‘green’ muddled it because readers did not always understand that I was using ‘green’ as it is used in the expression ‘green with envy’. This part of the third draft was not as powerful as I wanted it to be, so I added more lines that were more expressive and meaningful. I replaced it with this: “Emotions drifting between two shores: pride and envy./In the shadowed corner of the mind,/doubt suffocating, circling,/leering down at you, your small self/then,/inspiration.” I kept the idea of emotions swinging between pride and envy, but it became more direct and I brought in a metaphor, comparing my emotions to waves between those two shores. The lines afterwards communicated my angst with personification that then contrasted with the turn in the last line. I think that this change depicted a more complex portrayal of my emotions, and added more substance and meaning to my poem.
When I was creating my final draft, I decided to add more to the last verse of my poem. Originally in my third draft, this verse consisted of five rhyming lines, “But when you look to the sky/You see the golden rain falling, so shy/You feel the caress of light breathing life/Into your body.” The problem with this verse was that it didn’t convey positive emotions to the extent that I wanted it to. My poem was about finding balance between positivity and negativity, which meant that both the positive and negative sections needed to be equal. The verse before the last focused on negativity and was larger, so I decided I needed to refine and increase the last verse. It became this: “You see the golden rain falling, barely a sound/It tickles your fingertips, soaks your skin,/A whisper of misty energy running through your body/You feel the caress of light breathing life/Into you.” In this new version, I bring back imagery of water that I used at the beginning. I think that it creates the impression on the reader that this positivity, or hope, is both a physical and mental experience. Emotionally, it is meant to evoke an all encompassing feeling of relief and optimism, by causing the reader to imagine moisture soaking into their skin and energy revitalizing them while they watch luminescent rain fall from the sky. That is my exact idea of an experience that would improve my perspective and help me up no matter what.
The final change that was most essential to improving my poem is my revision of the very last line: “You see the golden rain, and/you can/finally/breathe.” In the beginning, this line was: “You see the rain, and you know why.” Both versions of this line were based on the same essential idea, which was the fleeting feeling I have sometimes where I feel some small understanding of why everything is as it is. The first version of the line was too vague, and addressed a question that hadn’t been introduced in the poem before. I was aiming to have that line be a reference to the overarching question of ‘Why?’, but in the end there was a more clear and elegant way to say a similar thing. When I feel like I have a grasp of joy because at that moment everything is going right, a weight is lifted off my chest and the relief is tangible. ‘Seeing’ the golden rain represents anything that inspires hope in me, making me feel light enough to really breathe deeply and feel air flow through my body. The second version of this line is multifaceted in that it covers all of the different ways this emotion manifests itself in my mind and physically in my body, much more so than the first line did.