Recently, our English class completed the final draft of our poems. This poetry assignment was rigorously tackled over a four-week period, and the satisfaction that I felt when I finally finished my poem was overwhelming. With guidance, I nurtured and developed the poem until it was something so meaningful and powerful that it fostered in me something that I had never felt before when it came to writing poetry: Pride. As a result of the amount of work that I had invested into my poem, I could not resist being proud of the progress that I had made. I was especially proud of the creative leaps I had made, from a shitty first draft to a true work of art.
However, even before the initial draft of a poem, a creative groundwork has to be laid. To me, this was accomplished through the Emotional Resonance exercise. In this primary exercise, I had to come up with the essence of the poem, or what the poem was going to be about. This may seem like a simple task, but it requires more than meets the mind. A poem cannot be masterfully constructed without a solid base, just as a building cannot be built without a solid frame. And what constitutes as a solid base? A moment. A powerful moment has the potential to be filled with emotional narrative and revolutionary insights. After a period of thought, my poem's moment came to me. It was perfect and undeniably a moment with much potential; it was a bank robbery. With a powerful moment established as my poem's structure, the next step was by far the most difficult. I had to actually write the thing.
To me, the first draft of my poem was the worst part of the poetry-writing process. Although building a poem based on a bank robbery opened countless doors that I could have taken in terms of emotional narratives, choosing which doors to enter in which order was extremely stressful. The only possible way of completing such a task was to buckle down, and face the writing head on. After around two hours of typing, deleting, and listening to inspirational music, my first draft had been completed. Through the foggy lenses of an exhausted brain, I was impressed at the product of my labor. However, little did I know that the poem with the most amount of work invested in it would yield the worst results.
Poetry has to aim for clarity through fresh language. I had always known this in the back of my mind, but I did not truly comprehend what it meant until my first draft was returned to me. For a reason unknown to me, I believed that poetry was beautiful through ambiguity. It sounds silly, but I truly thought that by muddying up the water it would make it easier to see whats underneath. Now that I think about it, any logical person would have face-palmed at that thought. Therefore, with this new epiphany in mind, I followed the advice I was given and began to edit my poem. Well, I failed again, as the poem still contained wrung-out language, submerged in gross, muddy water. I was obviously doing something wrong, and eventually came to the conclusion that I had built my poem wrong and started fresh. With the newly acquired insight in mind, I wracked my brain for a way to create a crystal clear poem, and I eventually found the answer. The key is in the details.
The mistake that I had made over and over again was I wasn't being transparent. Therefore, I made it my goal to be as precise as possible. The first and most influential leap that I made in my poem was when I gave the poem a location. At the time, I was listening to "Calgary" by Bon Iver, and at that moment, I decided to define a setting for my poem. Immediately after doing so, the creative juices could not be stopped. I began writing an extremely detailed poem, and I found that the beauty was truly in the words, not in the ambiguity of the poem. I wrote, in beautiful detail, about the snow coating the grass, the encounter between the robber and the bank manager, and even the decaying teeth of the criminal. After one more edit to completely eradicate cliche language and to extend the story of certain parts of the story, a wonderful emotional narrative was born. I believe that I was successful in writing a poem to be proud of all because of my revelation in writing poetry. Through the arduous and rewarding process of writing a poem, I revealed the beauty of language, the beauty of words, the beauty of detail.
