A great week.....
Monday I learned how to read, everyone telling me how smart I was
Tuesday was the day I kissed Julie on the bus, classmates staring me down
On Wednesday I could finally drive, and I cried when grandma disappeared
Thursday I got a degree and a job (I guess I'll be a teacher)
And Friday was a time to explore the world and my own true self
Saturday is making a new life with Lisa, forgetting Michelle
Today is.......well, the sun is coming up.
Richard,
ReplyDeleteThank you for going with the chronology poem (I guess you’d call it) for this week. I took a stab at this sort of poem and had such a difficult time being brief / simple that I ended up going with the prose poem (although still brief, I feel as though it afforded a bit more space to ramble). Speaking of rambling...
Borrowing the workshop techniques that Thom reviewed in class last week, I’d like to give you some more specific feedback re my reactions to this particular poem. As you read through my comments, you will encounter some praise as well as polish, some pure encouragement as well as more critical feedback. However, regardless of what it is that I say about what you have written, realize that I am one of many readers and that the unique way that I have interpreted this is by no means universal :)
First of all, the simplicity of your poem struck me in an extremely positive way (and this isn’t any sort of backhanded compliment). Instead, I really appreciated you likening the larger trajectory of your life to the progression of a single week. By using this method, I feel as though you afforded yourself a structure that basically “forced” you to effectively negotiate the details that you chose to include. In other words, in your span of a figurative week, I feel as though you did a really nice job of sorting through details, picking out and composing those that are easy for the reader to identify / find personal meaning with. In fact, this is a strategy that I TOTALLY can imagine using with students; some sort of activity requiring them to express their ENTIRE lives into the figurative span of a single week. I feel that this would similarly require students to slow down and critically think about the details that they include vs. just throwing down whatever comes to mind (if they hope to have a meaningful poem, at least).
However (and this is less of a “however” and more of just something to think about for this early draft should you chose to revise it), I almost feel as though some of the experiences you include could be more original and / or are almost too universal (Let me try to make sense of this observation...). Although readers will most likely identify with the experiences you relate (e.g., first kiss, first car, first real job), and perhaps creating something easy to identify with was your intent, I question if more “marginal / liminal” experiences thrown in here and there would be more powerful? More effectively illustrate who you are and the significant moments of YOUR unique life. Would there have been a benefit to the reader perhaps not totally identifying with the experiences you include? What do you think? Or am I missing something? (Which, I assure you, wouldn’t be the first time). In other words, I really enjoyed the method / structure behind your poem and really think it worked for you, but I can’t help but think that there are some more marginal / liminal experiences to power the poem. Thoughts?
I hope you found my feedback helpful for you, and again, I really enjoyed reading through this poem. In fact (and I again do not mean this as a back handed compliment), you’ve made me see the value in focusing on sometimes simple vs. needlessly complex structures of expression. I look forward to seeing more of your writing throughout our course :) See you in class on Tuesday.
-Rick Filipkowski