Page 128 - Student: dazed And Confused

The hardest part, initially, was to choose a handful of poems out of the many I thought were
good enough to be submitted. I wanted to choose pieces that were not instantly great, but
could become so with work. However, as certain things happened and time became a
factor, I decided to go with a few that seemed, to me, to be strong pieces already and did
not need too much work done to them. Well, that was the plan...

I admire the comic poetry of people like Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll. I always have done.
But I found - soon after I began writing poetry - that I could never write things like that. I
found myself drawing my own style from issues such as death, destruction, dama- there are
a lot of D words. I have attempted to include a range of different things in this selection,
from happy subjects to those less so.

As quite a fan of free verse, I was uncomfortable with the task of trying to find something
that was good and rhymed. Similar problems with form and such. As I write, I let my
intuition take over and dictate where I should have line breaks, start new stanzas and
whether there should be a rhyme scheme. So it was a struggle to have to consciously think
about these things. I learnt though that my writing would suffer if I tried to make it fit a
form for the sake of it. Over the course, tasks have been attempted of writing a sonnet or a
villanelle. I'm glad I had a go but I can't write to form - not consciously anyway. None of
the pieces here would have been improved for being forced into a form. 'Torn to shreds'
would not sound so vicious if it had been twisted into rhyming couplets. 'Passive' had to
rhyme to reflect the mindset of the person writing it, latching on to some constant.

I enjoyed a simile exercise we were given but my attempts were too long to include. And so
I chose 'Blossom' to feature one or two basic similes. Along these lines, metaphor is used
throughout most of my work. There are dogs, guitars, snow blossom. The metaphors that
convince you of themselves interest me more than the obvious ones.

I first took in two pieces called 'My mum' and 'The clock' to share with my group and get
feedback on. They gave me some useful ideas but I eventually decided to go with the
handful shown here as i became more harried in my need to produce something worth
reading. I ended up showing these pieces to friends and family as well, to get some advice
on the final pieces, after classes were finished.

I have a deep-seated wariness of using lower case letters to begin a line. I only managed to
do this to one of the pieces - 'Passive.' I just couldn't bring myself to do it to the others as I
feel each line warrants its own capital letter. The pieces I have read by my peers have lower
case lettering and run on lines, but they also advised me that it is not necessary as
capitalising the first letter should really just emphasize the importance of the line or, in my
case, word. Yes, another hang up of mine... long lines. I have tried to write poetry with long
line lines - some have even succeeded - but I prefer to write short lines or words that have
a bit of weight behind them. As you can probably tell by now, punctuation grates with me.
In all honesty, I couldn't punctuate a poem if my life depended on it. For some reason, it