Poetry

Bit of a late start on this one, but I do have some new ideas about poetry after having written and performed my own work. I had done work like this a couple times before in creative writing classes, and the process of writing my own poetry never really made sense. Sure, I knew about iambic pentameter from high school, and I knew a couple forms of poetry like sonnets or free verse, but writing my own felt either too abstract or too restrictive. 

If I tried to write a poem about my own experiences, it always came out like a bite-sized essay. It would always have a linear structure and would try to tell a story with flowery words, but I could never call it poetry. To me, anything I made just never felt as intentional as the works I read and studied in my classes.

On the other hand, if I tried to imitate a form like a sonnet, I would be too caught up in the details like meter, rhyme scheme and syllable count. It felt more like a puzzle than an expression, so I never thought those turned out well either.

This time, even though I'm happier with my work, I still feel like it doesn't hold up super well. As a writer, I want my stories and arguments to be understood or come across with some clarity, but if the poem is too short (it is), it feels too abstract to take much meaning out of it. This assignment was a fun exercise, but I think I need to put in a lot more work if I want to see the results I'm comparing myself to. 

If this exercise taught me anything that I could transfer to writing about poetry or teaching poetry, it would be to consider the author's background a lot more. Short, simple poems can make a lot of sense to the author, but might get lost in translation to a reader, and I think my poem would fall under this.

Anyway, here's the poem I wrote for this assignment. The goal was to "wreck the first person," shifting perspectives across multiple people. I tried to keep it cohesive, so it doesn't actually sound like it's two different perspectives. Enough rambling though, here's my haiku.

"Son and Mom"

I walk crooked paths

I limp—jumping brown, soaked Earth

One batch at a time

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If you're still reading and curious about the background, this poem was about myself and my mom. She has the stereotypical immigrant childhood story of having to cross rivers and hike mountains and go through thunderstorms to get to school, so I wanted to poke fun at both of our stories. 

The first line is about mine, specifically about my sports background and how I was always ending up injured. I have some permanent injuries leftover, and I used to walk a bit crooked (pretty sure it looks normal now). It's also a double entendre about some hypothetical mountain trail my mom might've taken on the way to school.

The second is mostly about her, though it starts with a jab at my injuries. The rest refers to how she always tells me how embarrassing it would be to jump over a river bank and get mud on her uniform.

The last line is a bit of an outlier, but the assignment for this required 3 stories, so I wrote about how I learned to cook fried rice. I had a lot of time to practice and freestyle a recipe for weeks when I messed up my hamstring. My mom is a great cook, so I tried to emulate her when learning, but I was mostly freestyling it one serving at a time. "Batch" sounded similar enough to "patch," so I figured it went well with the rest of the imagery.