Foreword
Dear America
This piece actually came from a in-class writing assignment. It’s an attempt to lean into the iambic meter in poetry. Another goal here was to use references that I had wanted to play with: Otto Rahn, The Holy Grail, Genene Jones, Peter Pan. These were people and items that I knew of, and I wanted to see if I could work them into a poem. Since using these references was one of the goals, the audience in my mind for this poem was not a general one. The piece assumes that the reader is aware of what the references mean, and does not attempt to explain the connections. The target genre was political poetry, so the narrator of this piece is a porcupine.
Sage for Terrance Hayes
This poem is in direct communication with Terrance Hayes’ “Snow for Wallace Stevens”, which itself is in comunication with multiple poems by Stevens. I imagined this poem as Stevens being unapologetic about his ideas about both literature and race, and using a Hayes-esque writing style to cement his legacy as a great poet and visionary. The challenge here for me was to not become egregiously offensive, but try and maintain the kind of abstract aloofness that Stevens’ work usually has.
The Round Table
This is my most experimental poem in terms of form. On page, it looks like a “round table” of some kind. This is a politcial poem, commenting on how sometimes the most obvious of solutions ormoral decisions become muddy due to economical concerns that may or may not be appropriate in different cases. The language here is not very poetic as such, and one of the goals here was to make use of font options to show a change in speaker.
Your Fault
“Your fault” is an expression of the infuriating victim blaming that happens in cases of sexual assault. Initially, it was a poem in couplets, but the revised draft is now in tersets that end in a single question. The idea here is to use the “unsaid” part of the poem in a way that allows the reader to reach their own conclusion. One of my goals with the revision was to reduce the repetition of “your fault”. The title says it already, and having it in every line felt a little too heavy. I like to think that as one reads through the piece, the questions become increasingly outrageous, climaxing with the question “Are you a woman?”. Overall, I don’t rely on a rhyme scheme or form, but the weight of the idea to carry the poem through.
Home
This is a poem of place. The goal here is to engage all of the reader’s senses. I wanted to let them feel the place, instead of just reading about it. The sounds, smells, tastes, temperature, hugs, refletion in a mirror, are all ways to ground someone in the place that I am talking about, which is our family’s home in India. The driving idea for this piece was to start with as “colorful” of a description as I could, only to juxtapose it against the sudden loss of sensations. The poem is written in tersets ending in a quatrain (Dante was great). The goal for revision here was to improve the rhythm by removing unecessary details.
Pune
This is a pantoum. It’s once again a piece that talks about moving away, but this timewe have a “couple” of sorts (could be friends, family, etc.). The goal with the pantoum was to progress the story while still repeating the lines as in a traditional pantoum. The piece does this by using punctuation where appropriate, to change the pacing and what the phrases themselves mean. The central idea is established right in the beginning, and then the central metaphor of the city being a womb of sorts is what carries through the whole piece. The only revision here was to introduce the actual name of the city in the beginning, and chaning the title from “City” to “Pune”.
On Writing A Letter
This is a letter poem about how I don’t write letters. The recipient is Prof. Dean Rader, the man that asked me to write a letter. The core idea here is to play the game of performative contradiction. I describe exactly what I am doing, while denying doing so. There is some use of internal rhyming and questions, but the bulk of the poem is this game. The goal with the revision of this piece was to balance the playfulness with actual material and the core claim. As such, there was a lot of removing of lines. Another part removed had been added in earlier purely for putting on a performance in class, which I thought was out of place in this poem.
An Ode To Lemonade
This piece was the first poem I wrote this semester. The goal was to write a poem with only enjambed lines. I wanted to celebrate the lemonade and capture that sensation of dozing off with a cool drink in the Sun. Another thing I wanted to try was to come up with as many euphemisms I could for a lemonade without actually using the word “lemonade” in the poem. The poem starts with an alliteration and the internal rhymes give it a definitive rhythm. The goal for revision in this piece was to replace the cliched “chill down my spine” with something that evoked a similar sensation.
Reflection on Things Far Gone
This is a ghazal. I set myself the challenge of repeating a phrase at the end of the couplets, instead of a singular word. I chose then phrase “when you are gone”. Not only did I want to use a phrase, I wanted to make homophone phrases that I could use too. I came up with “venue argon” and “vin you argh on”. I really enjoyed this kind of exercise, it involved me splitting the IPA notation for these words to figure this out. The assignment initially asked for a variety of couplets, and in the revision of this ghazal, my goal was to come up with more ways to reach the “when you are gone” phrase in a novel way. This was the hardest piece to revise, I completely blanked on what to add. So insted, I removed the couplet which I thought was a duplicate idea.
Picnic
This is the experimetnal sonnet that Lana Borrillo and I wrote for this class. The idea was to describe a sort of picnic with fruits, but alphabetizing the whole piece. We go through the entire English alphabet in sequence. There is also a journey for the senses with touch, taste, and smell. A way for the reader to experience the fruits along with the characters in the poem. The goal with editing in this piece was to tighten the ending in a way that would close in the ideas in the piece. To be clear, I changed the title for this portfolio, and I am still not convinced it is the right one. I can’t think of one that is more suited, so I will leave it as “Picnic” for now.