I think one of the things that this course has taught me is how to benefit from an organized type of chaos in my writing; bringing together old stanzas to create new pieces. Before taking this course, I had a number of different notebooks and folders filled with scraps of unfinished pieces I'd write (usually during my travels).
I'm happy to see a sort of structure come about in my work, actual pieces finally rising to the surface of my stacks of writing. The majority of my writing has been a result of traveling and meeting a variety of people, which often results in me quickly writing and then moving onto the next piece.
Revisiting these old fragments, along with revision techniques I've learned in class this semester, has resulted in me producing much more work than ever before, especially while in college.
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I was going through the same sort of thing -- recently my parents came up and took a bunch of boxes from my dorm. (That's so we didn't have to take 2 cars in May...)
ReplyDeleteBut anyway, one small box seemed to be a bunch of folders and loose papers in her eyes, and she wanted to throw it away.
I had to explain to her that it's a bunch of unfinished or first/second/third drafts of poetry from the course of the year.
This class definitely helped me figure out how to edit, and how to really see when revisiting and revising poetry. Great post, thanks for sharing!
I feel the same way. I have been writing poetry and lyrics for the past few years and a lot of it is just unorganized thoughts that came to mind. I have a notepad in my Ipod that is filled with random ideas and I recently looked back on some and recreated coherent poetry from fragmented sentences. A lot of the unrevised pieces turned into some pretty cool stuff after cutting away a lot of "fat".
ReplyDeleteAll of my poetry is sort of chaotic anyways, and I like it that way. However I'd have to agree, the class taught me how to actually finish things, or find good parts in old poems that I didn't even like. I may actually take one I wrote in high school and use it in my portfolio, the essence is there but it's not quite yet ready.
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