My Poetry
The poems in this folder span from my four years in college, specifically from my Intro to Creative Writing class my sophomore year, and my Readings in Creative Writing my senior year.
The assignment was to write a poem based off of any piece of artwork. I chose the "The Promenade, Woman with a Parasol" by Claude Monet.
In my Intro to Creative Writing class, we had several assignments and free writes that were meant to evoke creativity and inspiration for poems. This is one of mine.
In my Readings in Creative Writing class, we had a section focused on poetry and the different types of poems. One we learned in class was the contrapuntal poem, meaning that it is two stanzas side by side that can be read separately and together.
In Reading in Creative Writing, a poetry assignment was to craft a poem that could be recited out loud, focusing heavily on sonic resonances, musical qualities, tone, language, etc. It was also assigned that the poem needed to include the names of at least three contemporary political figures.
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The idea of a golden shovel poem is to take the first line and incorporate it into the last word of each line of a new poem. With this poem, I used the first line of Wislawa Szymborska's "Utopia."
In Readings in Creative Writing, the assignment was to write an erasure poem using a piece of text/writing that I believed to be relevant to our contemporary sociopolitical context. Then, we were to take that piece of text and erase bits and pieces, while keeping certain words, to make a poem.
In Readings in Creative Writing, we were to write a poem inspired by our readings we'd done of Gil Scott-Heron's poetry - specifically how he spoke of activism, calls-to-action, revolution, politics, etc., all while writing in melodic, performance-like poems. We were to write a poem of any length or form that focused on sound (rhythm, rhyme, assonance, consonance, etc.) while also exploring a contemporary sociopolitical/socioeconomic idea. The poem had to include a refrain as well.
In September of 2023, my assignment for Readings in Creative Writing was to write a poem going off of a journal entry written the week prior inspired by Audre Lorde talking about what it is I find personally mysterious - whether that be a dream, an experience, a memory, etc. We were to write continuously for 20 minutes with no revising, deleting, editing, or stopping. The focus was on description rather than finding any type of answer. The poem based off of this journal entry could be revised, edited, rearranged, etc., to turn it from prose to poem.
