My Thoughts on My Work

I’m a firm believer in raw emotion. I’ve always felt that my best work comes when I’m not trying too hard, and I believe that this especially shows in my poetry. Poetry, to me, is more potent than fiction in expressing one’s true feelings. I often feel that when I read a poem I am looking into that author’s soul, and this is not a feeling I get with fiction. Of all the poems I wrote this semester, the ones that mean the most to me are the elegy, “October,” my open form poem, “Reaching,” and my pastoral, “Wasatch.” These three poems were written in the proverbial “heat of the moment,” and I tried to convey my emotions through the poetry. As I wrote, I had no thought whatsoever for the form of these poems. It was only later, during revisions, that I realized that whatever form these poems had taken expressed the desired emotions just as much as the words themselves. Since I realized this, the revision process was extremely simple for me. I had figured out that the form worked the way it was, and if I tried to mess with it too much I would lose something.

Let us look first at the elegy, “October.” I feel that some back-story is necessary here. When I was fourteen years old, I was enamored with the world of theatre. It was everything I wanted at the time. Everything I did was putting me towards that goal. It was not until I came to SUU that I decided to leave that world behind me. October has always been the time of year that these memories come back the strongest; because it seems that all of my theatre memories happened in October. I made the switch from a music performance major to an English major in January of 2009 because I knew that I had to do it. Somewhere deep down, I knew that I needed to write more than I needed to perform. But even now, as much as I love writing, I feel a sense of loss for my former self. I tried to convey that in this poem, not only with the words but with the structure of the stanzas as well. The line numbers themselves are insignificant, but the pattern is what matters. Two stanzas of three, then two of four, with the exception of the last stanza. It should have four lines, as per the pattern, but I ended it at three because that era of my life, despite its potency at the time, was cut short. The only change that I made in the revision of this poem was to cut one line and add another so that the line count matched up in each stanza.

The open form poem, “Reaching,” is a companion to “October,” and was written only a few weeks later. This one was especially meaningful to me because this year the nostalgia lasted longer than the month of October. Usually October is a bit mellow because of all the memories, but November – and the beginning of the holiday season – brightens things up a bit. This wasn’t the case this year, though. The first few weeks of November were especially painful, remembering the theatre I had done in the past and how much I missed that world. Also, a boy who’s broken my heart more times than I care to admit decided to start talking to me again, and that’s always difficult. The form of this poem was assigned, but I still was pleasantly surprised by the ease that this content fit into the form. The stanzas are, again, simply the length they are to create a nice feeling of conciseness, but it’s the couplets that I wrestled with. I tried to write them so that, even if they had punctuation, they could be read as a single thought. This is especially true with the second couplet. It can read, “It can reach me here in the safety of November,” but it can also read, “It can reach me here. In the safety of November, the memories return.” I tried to use the couplets to create that sense of punctum, because early November was just that, a bit painful. I also find it interesting to note that punctum is also the Latin word for tear ducts. That is an interesting correlation. I actually made no revisions to this poem, because this was one of those cases where I felt that the raw emotion would be lost if I changed anything.

The third poem I’ve chosen is my pastoral, “Wasatch.” It wasn’t until after I’d written it that I realized that this pastoral is also an elegy, and that was not a conscious choice on my part. The assignment for this poem was to think of our relationship to a particular place in nature, and nowhere do I have a stronger relationship than with South Fork Park, which is up Provo Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains. On June 5, 2000 a cottonwood tree fell as my family was having a birthday party. My grandmother and cousin, both named Mollie Rose Sorensen, were killed. As I wrote this poem, I tried to remember how I felt in the early years after the accident. I was afraid of cottonwood trees. I wanted them all cut down. But as the years have passed and my family has gone back every Memorial Day to plant flowers, I have lost that fear. I enjoy going to that park now. I might even go so far as to say I feel safe there. I almost feel a disdain for the cottonwood trees that grow there now, because I know that the one that fell on our birthday party was bigger than the ones that are still there, and I tried to convey this in my poem as well. Part of the assignment for this poem was that the stanzas were each four lines long, so my writing process went something like this: freewrite about how I feel about South Fork Park, then and now; dash out some quatrains on the subject; pick the best quatrains and re-order them into a poem. I was frankly surprised by how well the quatrains fit together and managed to convey how I really felt. The only changes I made to this poem were to add another stanza talking about my cousin and grandmother, and to fix some simple grammatical errors.

When I first embarked on this semester, I thought that I would be forced to revise my work, and I worried that I would lose that raw emotion. Since I have tried to revise my poems, though, I’ve realized that the raw emotion is what makes the poetry work. The simple revisions I’ve made have no doubt helped a bit, but the revisions were so simple, so small, that I hardly notice them at all. I guess I’ve truly realized what Basho meant when he said that there can be no distance between the writer and the subject of the poem. When this happens with me, the “end” result is a poem that is full of the emotions I wish to convey, and no revision is necessary.