Page 129 - Student: dazed And Confused

seems so much harder than punctuating prose. And so I use the bare minimum I can get
away with so it makes sense. 'In pain and peace' as an example, would not work at all if it
was punctuated - guitars don't have colons and commas, they just run on until the amp
explodes.

I was quite surprised that my peer group did not pick up on my grammatical quirks as it
seemed like a fault in comparison. They were more concerned with the words and content
of the poems. That was a blessing for me as I, you now know, do not care much for the
technicalities... not when time is so scarce. They all offered helpful ideas such as how the
dog poem should maybe lose and or a but. On rereading it, I discovered a few more
extraneous little words that got the chop too. I offered the poem with a second I had
written shortly after but 'Torn to shreds' won out, despite needing slightly more work, as it
had such strong visual qualities. The line that originally read 'And then hungry dogs, mad
dogs, rabid dogs' was changed to reading 'And then howling dogs, hungry dogs, mad dogs'
and i think it sounds better. I was advised to maybe leave the line at two types of dogs but I
couldn't quite bring myself to do that as I like the set of three, so I substituted a word and
shifted around a little. Now, I like the H sound in that bit.

There was very little work I needed to do, and was willing to do, on 'In pain and peace.' The
poem had already been edited quite a bit and was received very well at a previous reading.
My only concern with this was the phrase 'bleed redder and redder' which has now replaced
'bleed deeper and deeper'. I realised shortly before the performance that it sounded weird
to have two ee sounds so close together. I also intend to read this at the end of term
performance - a challenge as it is a high energy piece.

'Beautiful things' was my attempt at writing something a bit more cheerful than my usual
work, but considering it is about a soul being guided through life and death, it probably isn't
that different. I decided to write this one in a number of two lined verses because it just
seemed to fall out of my pen like that - a series of moments where a person may just
vaguely notice or sense the titular beautiful things. I chose this as an example of my
experimenting with form a bit more. It was intended to be a metric poem with the same
number of beats in a line, but some of the words were a syllable too long or short. So with
me unable to think of any suitable alternative, I shortened one or two words (beside for
'side) and I cut one entire verse out:
Ghostly essences of my guardians

Are watching my each and every step
I like the verse and wish I had left it in, but 'each and every' jarred with me and sounded a
bit rubbish when I read it out.

Now, ' Passive', I must confess that I was thoroughly unhappy with including it because it
was one of my most over-written pieces to date. But, my peers seemed to like it. I
punctuated it and used lower cases to begin some lines. I realised myself that I should at
least have a go at it, though most people barely mentioned it. I was told that there were
some lines that didn't quite flow due to the words I used, so I found substitutes like forever