Today was almost entirely prep for tomorrow, though I did end up writing another poem I quite liked, and am planning on including in the chapbook. It’s one in a style that I wanted to include but hadn’t before, in which the poem is written with / slashes around / every few words / like so / and there are / no line breaks. This independent study has allowed me to become quicker at writing poems, to be honest, and this one didn’t take me as long as it would have normally. I also spent a good portion of time working on the design—I finally got Photoshop to stay up, so I was able to do some more than I could on my iPad (I had a lot of overlays and PNGs saved on my computer, which was useful). I made a lot more designs, but these are the two I’m considering on using: The rest of the time I spent planning and putting together the presentation for tomorrow on Slides—I’ve got a series of poems I have prepared, and I’m going to print some out and use them to talk about what I read and did, as long as bringing along some books or other notes. I'm putting together the actual chapbook on my iPad, so once I'm done with it, I'll export it as a PDF and show it on my computer (or I could keep it on my iPad as well, if I want people to read it at the same time).
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I’m trying to tie everything together as best I can right now, and so I spent a good portion of the day working on potential cover designs and layouts for my chapbook. Since my Photoshop isn’t working right now, I’ve been using Photoshop Mix on iPad to put everything together, which isn’t as fun as regular Photoshop for me, but I’m still used to it enough to work. Here’s a few examples of some of the designs I was working on: I’m using both more of a traditional style of chapbook and zines as inspiration for how I want to represent everything. The internet is a trove for discovering examples of different chapbooks, and a collection of chapbooks is available at the website for Boaat Press, which I looked through for inspiration. They’re actually a lot more out there than I thought; some of them are more typical, with no pictures and just a different color or texture of background, like below: But some are a lot more unique, and follow their theme, like this one: Since I also like to do photography, I went through most of my recent photos and picked a good portion of them that I could potentially use to accompany the poems, or to highlight certain aspects of them (or also just to serve as aesthetically pleasing visual aids). I’m going to try to incorporate photos and whatnot in a way that makes it a little more polished than a regular zine, but nonetheless still creative, or something I’d like.
Monday September 9 I spent a lot of today editing writing and planning out the layout for my actual chapbook; I went back into some other of the poems I wrote earlier and worked with those to my liking. Among those were the villanelle, sijos, and some of the other poems I had written in the past few days. Here’s an edit of a sijo: I also spent some time going through places like Winter Tangerine and Boaat Press to find some new pieces and writers I liked—a poem I was reading, "diaspora: a narcolepsy hymn" by Kyle Dargan, made me think about using repetition as both a lyrical and intentional aspect of future poems, while I also enjoyed "the situation is gratifying" by Carlina Duan. I always find it interesting when people implement social or political issues in their poetry, which Duan does here (if you look up the phrase at the beginning of the poem, it's a translation of the title, and a propaganda poster will come up), not to mention the intertwining of it with diaspora issues, which I find to be very enjoyable, personally. Below is the first section of the poem (which turns more political as it goes on). Aside from that, I was searching through the depths of the internet to find inspiration for how I want to lay out my chapbook; I looked through places like issuu.com, along with various other Google links, to find online versions of zines people had made. I mostly focused on the ones related to or primarily about writing, whether they be all poetry/fiction/prose or focused on another issue but using those methods to highlight their topic (i.e. mental health, space, etc.). Here's one I saw which I thought the layout of was interesting:
Friday September 6 Today I mainly followed up on what I was doing yesterday, and I'm starting to get into editing mode for the intensive fair next week. For the next four days, I'm going to be working on a lot of editing, and churn out as much writing as I can. I went back to my first poem, and spent some time working on it, rearranging the language to how I wanted it to be. I think some parts of it I ended up liking best were “the sky / cracks open and spills out its grief / and a new home emerges for my fears” and using imagery like “drink in the light i can”. I was trying to channel some of the writers I had read before, like Hanif Abdurraqib and Marilyn Hacker, primarily. I also went back and worked on my second poem, reworking the ending to how I liked it. I could go change or add some things in to fit with the cohesiveness of the entire book once I’m done, but I think I’ll go back and change some things around once I’ve finished as well. I kind of like now how this poem feels very stream of consciousness (I know I mentioned it before), how when you read it it feels like you can’t breathe, because that’s what I had in mind writing it. The rest of the time I spent reading about translations, which is something that my sponsor had talked to me about. I read an essay by Raquel Salas-Rivera about translation, in which she touched on specific word usage as a reflection of the topic of translation, particularly relating to subjects like the state of Puerto Rico and concepts like loss. Here are some sections I found noteworthy:
Thursday September 5 I decided to continue off what I was doing yesterday, and write more specifically and try to shift my frame of mind a little bit. I worked mostly on two poems today, and I spent a lot of the morning doing both readings and various research on poetry’s history in general, and some favorite movements. Poetry has evolved tremendously since it’s beginning up until our present day. There’s quite a lot of archaeological evidence of poetry being written back in prehistoric and very early times, whether it be in Africa or parts of Asia (an example being the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia, or ancient Chinese verses). Poetry has been so versatile as to appear as folk songs and oral epics, though poetry in the traditional sense is still agreed upon as being written. Usually poetry is a form of language in which words are compact, but have more meaning with a smaller area than typical prose does, and tends to reach its goals of effectively conveying certain emotions or moods through the use of such devices as imagery, assonance, and rhythm. I decided to hone in on a specific movement and go into confessional poetry’s beginnings, as that was one of the first genres of poetry outside of modern poetry (or anything I had to do for school) that I really enjoyed and looked into (I still have a copy of the collected Anne Sexton I bought from Dawn Treader). Confessional poetry was a mid-twentieth century style, which was made prominent in particular by Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and W. D. Snodgrass, and was a product of America in the 1950s and 1960s. What this subset consisted of was typically personal and private experiences about life, death, and a large variety of other topics—Sylvia Plath’s topics ranged from feminism to the Holocaust, while Anne Sexton would write incredibly personal reflections of her dealings with mental illness and family life. I always liked the looser style of confessional poetry, mixed with the way typical “emotional” topics would often be treated as both intimate and separated from the writer, private and poignant but an art form nonetheless. Here's what I wrote today (the first is the full one, the second an excerpt):
Wednesday September 4 Today was some more writing for me, but I started it off by doing some more reading to try and get a different kind of feel. I went through some poets from the twentieth century, including Coleman Barks, Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, and more. I still feel a difference between the type of poetry that's common to find in today's era and the twentieth century, but it's still years closer than what you'd find before the eighteenth, or even nineteenth, century. I think I just prefer more recent poetry because it's so much closer to the syntax we use now that it doesn't feel odd, while still maintaining a mastery of language; sometimes I feel as if more modern poetry is slightly more liberal with what it can do, as we use language much more freely now, both in terms of word choice and structure. Here are some poems from today that I liked below, by Adrienne Rich and Frank O'Hara, respectively: I worked some more on actual writing after this, with a picture of that below: I think tomorrow I'd like to work on making (once again) a more specific poem, whether it be a narrative structure or some kind of representation of an object or feeling. Reading through writers like Frank O'Hara and Sylvia Plath gives me an idea of how I'd like to work through that, as they both are (obviously) quite skilled at both.
Tuesday September 2 Today was somewhat similar to yesterday, except I decided to try to switch everything I wrote into not necessarily a strict form, but some kind of form for the poem that wasn’t just [line] (enter) [line] (enter). What I was thinking of by that was something like the format of “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” by Richard Siken, or “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong, which are both below: Here's a poem I worked on today, which I tried to do something similar for:
Friday August 29 Today I decided to go more into less structured (or at least formally structured) poetry, and work on writing what I usually want to write about instead, particularly being inspired by yesterday’s readings. I wanted to try a few different ones, and see what I liked. I tried to take certain aspects of poems that I really like and incorporate them into my own, some of those being using nouns as verbs, heavy imagery, unconventional language, and more. This was the first one I wrote, which I want to edit a little more once I get into my editing stage later: (Side note: writing poetry takes an annoyingly long amount of time.)
I might want to restructure this later, and make it either more of a narrative or add different elements (and in particular change up the way I use language in here a bit). Here’s another one: Thursday August 29 Today I decided to take a break from writing (perhaps the villanelles tired me out a bit) and work on both editing and reading today instead, since I hadn’t gotten a chance to really go deeper into a lot of poets rather than just look at some within the style I was to study. I picked some of my favorite poets to go into, and tried to go deep into some more that I hadn’t found before; I like to go on different journals online, whether it be Adroit, Sooth Swarm, Blueshift, or any other. I hadn’t gotten the chance to peruse their sites in quite a while because I’ve been swamped with commitments, both this summer and through the past year, and so there was a lot I had to catch up on. Here are some of my favorites below: I feel like just the first sentence sets up the poem to be impactful: bone, then the threading of one's own body to an animal's, to a country, to a family. I love when any piece of writing is able to handle violence into something skillful and palatable, and the references to blood and death aren't so prominent as to overpower you, but rather to stitch together a creature that takes form in your mind. The canyon of association that the writer sets up between a country that is hers and not at the same time, what she says she does about it. The intersection between different aspects of existence I thought was particularly interesting in this poem. One of my favorite things about (many) poems is irregular language; "Every bride is a basket / we fill with fresh eggs." "swallowing fish bones will / grow a girl in me." (one example I always think of is "I anglerfish. I terrify. I skin-search / at the bottom of the pool." from Christina Im's Necessary Roughness, published in Adroit.) How she harnesses the disgust often felt by outsiders at certain cultural practices and combines it with her own sexuality, equates herself to the object of disgust, how she bears the ride through her existence. Any line of this poem I could pick out and use as an example of efficacious and engaging prose, whether it be "Mine of a prayer / arrowheaded in silence" or "Daughterhood is something like dogness / in that we eat what is fed" or "Be the son in my lineage of losses." Reading favorites of mine and new finds always renews my motivation to write anything, and it worked particularly in this case; now I have some new ideas I want to try out, and different directions I want to go in in terms of writing. Some other pieces I read and didn't mention were "Ignition" by Helli Fang, "Magnitude" by Rona Wang (prose, but one of my favorites, and fits well with my theme), "matrimony / matriarchy" by Yujane Chen, "Duende" by Tracy K. Smith, "Perihelion: A History of Touch" by Franny Choi, "A New National Anthem" and "How To Triumph Like A Girl" by Ada Limón, and many more.
I’m personally not very big on meter; I tend to touch contemporary poets much more frequently than I do poets from before the twentieth century, so I’m not as accustomed to older styles of writing, or certain formats. I’d only really done so for class—we had done sonnets and odes, and I was alright with iambic pentameter, but there are some other forms I’ve never gone into much, one of those being villanelles. I wanted to try villanelles because I remember that the other English class had tried them and our class didn’t, so I looked over my friends’ and thought that they looked fun, and decided to pursue them more during this. The most famous villanelle I know is probably “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas. A villanelle consists of nineteen lines, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. It is structured as five tercets and a quatrain after; the first and third lines of the first tercet are “repeated alternately in the in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines.” Another way of denoting the form s this: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2. The origin of the villanelle is as a dance-song in Italy and Spain, and it flourished during the Renaissance, but was less structured than what we know it as today. To be honest, these were more difficult than I had anticipated. I’m used to writing a certain way, one that involves a lot more freedom with line breaks and rhythm, and I was absolutely not as familiar with writing with rhymes and meter. I’m not too big on choosing my language based on how they sound fitted into a meter, and therefore the words I chose sound a lot more basic than what I usually do and the entire thing sounds pretty stunted. I think I’m going to have to go back and either revise this poem or perhaps write a new one in it’s place, because I’m not entirely satisfied with how it turned out, but I decided to finish it anyways because they’re both a lot of energy to write and it’s better to have one complete poem that I can go back on later and work through.
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