University Poetry Portfolio and Commentary
My portfolio for ELL231 - Art of Modern Poetry along with my own commentary / self critique on the creative process. Warning - content deals with mild domestic abuse and dead things.
A Murdered Child
Motionless on the concrete,
A patterned slab of grey and black
Chipped and cracked and dirty.
One day I came across a body.
Huddled, curled up into himself,
So fragile in the morning dew
That had slowly settled over him.
He looked bright in the spring sunshine,
Tawny hues and copper browns glittering.
And I wondered for a moment
That perhaps he was only sleeping.
But I knew this wasn’t true,
As I peered closer to see blood,
The fang punctures dark on his chest.
I saw the parted mouth,
As if he was still letting out his final shriek.
And the beady eyes unmoving, quiet.
I moved his broken body gently,
So small and limp in my hands,
Bones snapped and fell away.
A tiny bird, killed by the cat.
Imagery, I find, is one of the most important aspects of poetry. As an artist as well as a writer - images are an important way of communicating with an audience. The use of this device has always been my favourite part of reading both prose and poetry from a young age. It’s been something I’ve always tried to incorporate into my own writings, I want to share the things I see in my own head with others and with practice over the years, I think it’s become my strongest aspect of my poetry.
In an exercise in class, in which we were require to take an illustration and write a poem focused on imagery. After this, I was inspired to take an image and write another poem to go toward my portfolio. ‘The Murdered Child’ was based off a metaphor I had often read in books several times before: Children being compared to small animals such as mice or birds. For example, small quiet children are like mice, or others being like fawns. I recall in one novel I once read - the death of a child and ultimately the destruction of her family from that was written as a warren of rabbits being poisoned and under the ground, they all curled up into themselves and died - which I believed to be a very powerful and emotional image. But when I thought about it, I had never come across the opposite - of an animal being compared to a child.
The idea for the poem came to me when I came across a small bird my cat had brought home one morning over Easter. I scribbled down a few thoughts and what it looked like lying out on the patio before using these for a poem. Unfortunately, I though this poem was one that not everyone understood and saw that some criticized me for being too over emotional on the subject. But I do feel a great deal of sadness when my pets bring home animals. I thought the idea of the bird being compared to a human was clever and wanted to point out that animals can be as human, just as humans can be viewed as animals through the use of metaphors. After all, isn’t the small bird lying out in my garden someone’s child too?
The Balloon
You held me,
A balloon on a string.
As a child I was close,
Bobbing cheerily at your side.
Reaching up to the skies,
But never straying too far.
You held me, so tenderly.
And I grew,
The winds of age came.
I struggled against you,
A balloon too big to be held so close.
Fighting to be swept away,
To be lost in the darkness of youth.
And you held me, so protectively.
I am grown,
You unwind the cord a little.
I float further away,
Searching for my own way.
Reaching for the free air,
For my dreams, but still too close.
And you held me, so stubbornly.
Let me go,
You fear the engines of planes.
But you made me so well,
Gave me life and the courage to float.
And I will touch the stars,
But one day, I will happily return.
And you will hold me, once more.
As it is obvious in ‘One Day’ - I have drawn from my own experiences and emotions when it comes to writing my poetry. My strength comes from writing on my emotions, often negative ones and I think that the poems I write based on my own personal experiences are the more powerful ones in my portfolio. ‘The Balloon’ was a poem written for my mother and about our sometimes stubborn relationship we’ve had whilst I was growing up due to us being so similar in nature. The balloon is used as a metaphor of our relationship - I’m the balloon and my mother is represented by the person holding the balloon.
As the eldest, I was the first in my family to do many new things; I sat through my A Levels and got to University. I felt that my relationship with my mother became a little strained due to my want to push out and enjoy life and her fear of me doing new things very much alone. However, sometimes the things I wanted to do as a teenager weren’t the best - the crowds of people I wanted to be part of weren’t good for me and as I would fight against my mother for steering me away - I look back on that now as she was just protecting me. It was the complete opposite of when I was very young, where I was nigh-inseparable from her because of growing up in a single parent family.
It was a concept we both struggle with and it’s a period of life I’m still trying to come out of. While still being held, I’m pushing out for what I want to do or where I want to go. The poem is almost like a plea, as a person - I know I’ve been brought up well and I know I can go out and live life. But I need to be ‘let go of’ in order to do so. The idea of ‘coming back down’ in the last stanza was meant to reflect that although in life, we do let our children go to lead their own lives - they will come back to us. I got the idea partly from the old saying: “If you love someone, set them free. And if they return, it was meant to be.” The helium in a balloon never lasts forever and eventually it will come back down from wherever it is floating. I likened this to that some point in my life, I will return to my family once again.
One Day
they were standing
in the
dry dirt and the
sun was bright.
and it hurt my eyes
and i didn’t like the shouting.
it would have
been a nice day if
they weren’t shouting.
pressed against the
car window or
huddling against my baby brother.
i forget but i
was crying.
i didn’t like the hitting.
it would have been
a nice day if
they weren’t hitting.
and i saw mammy cry
and daddy
with his fists high up.
and the car
was too hot.
it would have
been a nice day if
the car wasn’t hot.
and we went
inside the kitchen
and outside
they were still shouting.
and i could hear the tv
dunno what was on.
it was a nice day
cos grandma
she gave us biscuits.
My poem ‘One Day’ is based from a childhood experience when I was around four years old - where I witnessed a fight between my mother and father. Around the time, my parents had split up and were in the middle of a harsh custody battle. They fought often, usually when me and my brother weren’t around - but there was still times when I witnessed things. I could be asked of why I wanted to write a poem about something like this. It was indeed a very complicated and turbulent time for a child, but looking back it felt like an important time in my life in a creative sense. It was the first time I remember feeling emotions, even though on a basic level. The sadness and fear I felt has often been a fuel for my creativity; I write sad things because it’s the emotion I’ve known the longest and feel like it’s the strongest one when it comes to writing or drawing.
Sometimes I believe this is why I find it difficult to write poetry with a more happy voice or nature, looking at all my poems I’ve submitted over the course of the module - they all have a tone of sadness. As a writer, I find this both good and bad. While I know where my strengths lie in terms of writing, I feel that perhaps I’m not stretching out to take on all tones of poetry and prose. In future, I hope that I can expand my writing horizons in order to better my skills overall.
The memory written about in the poem was probably the strongest one I can remember, but it was something I was unable to understand due to my young age. I was old enough to take things in, but still too young to comprehend the complexity of it. I was aware of the certain aspects around me like the uncomfortable morning heat of the car or the dry dirt of where we were when it happened. Although I understand more about the memory now, at the time I didn’t realise why my parents were fighting or the amount of violence used. All I knew was that it was a largely unpleasant memory. I had very simple judgement on the experience; I could tell if things were ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - what I liked and didn’t like.
This sense of judgment is reflected in the voice of the poem and the language I used to write it. In order to achieve a realistic child’s voice, I kept the words very simple and wrote the events down as I saw or heard them before making a judgement on them. My poem lacked punctuation and grammar as naturally, young children don’t possess enough knowledge to understand the proper usage of it - apart from full stops. The use of ‘and’ also reflects a child’s voice more realistically as I’ve often experienced from hearing young children talk, they tend to reel off things in lists as they speak ‘And this happened and then and I did this.’ Overall, I think that using a child’s voice and view point on such a violent and somewhat complex matter makes the poem more powerful. When being critiqued by my classmates, they all commented on the voice being the strongest aspect of the poem and I agree with this. I felt this was a poem I’ve managed to ‘get right’ the first time round on writing it and found myself not wanting to change very much of the poem save from a few words.
Brain Tap.
My brain too full
of so many things.
If I could grab a tap,
And fix into my skull,
and turn it on
so many things
would all come pouring out.
Dirty little secrets
I've kept for so long.
Moments I long to forget,
so many pretty, pretty words.
But so many other things
would come tumbling out.
I'd just lose them all.
My talents and dreams
would come spilling out
and splash down my nose,
down my clothes
and drip
drip
drip
onto the floor.
Lost forever.
Perhaps I'd be better off
just keeping my brain too full.
At least no one may accuse me
of being empty-headed.
Brain Tap’ was based from a piece of prose I wrote about a year ago and wanted to work it into a piece of poetry. It was written around the time of my final assessments last year and I felt that the amount of knowledge I’d learnt over the last year was actually making my head hurt. I thought I’d learnt too much and kind of wanted to forget some things. This is how the image of the ‘brain tap’ came to be; it was just the idea of having a tap in the middle of my forehead and being able to empty my brain. But then, as I thought on the idea more, you can’t really control what comes out of a tap - and in the poem’s narrative, I wondered what would happen if I really did possess such a thing. I’d probably end up losing everything - not just what I wanted to get rid of.
I think with this poem, imagery was a very strong aspect too. The idea of the brain tap isn’t one I’ve even heard of before and I think for someone to imagine something new when they read a poem - the idea seems to be far more poignant, they seem to pick up on it more than an image they’ve already seen before. However, overall - I felt this was one of my weaker poems, as it required a lot of work on it. I agreed with the critiques given to me on this poem - I felt like I had rambled a little and it was too repetitive on some parts. While it received a good reception in terms of imagery, I felt that there was still work to be done on it - it was perhaps not as polished as my other poems seemed to be.
Overall / Conclusion
My poems are written in free verse as I find this to be a less constricting way of writing how I feel or what I want to put across to a reader. There is little rhyme to my poems and the times where it does happen to rhyme is mostly accidental. I feel that this does work extremely well with poets and their work, often some of the wittiest and most powerful poems I’ve read - for example Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ is one of my most favourite poems and has a very strong emotional impact on me with its form as a villanelle. But when it comes to my own work, I feel like I’m forcing my words when I try to have some sort of rhyming structure. Saying this, that doesn’t mean that there’s no structure at all to my portfolio poems. Sometimes lines are repeated to enforce emotions to the reader, particularly in ‘The Balloon’ where I wanted to emphasise the emotional relationship between me and my mother.
Compared to poetry work last year, I think my writing has greatly improved and matured. In the last year, I’ve read more and begun to understand the values of poetry through the module. Through this, I think my poetry has gained more depth and meaning. I now feel like I’m not writing for the sake of writing. In the future, I wish to try and write poetry with a different voice - and attempt to come away from the often sorrowful tones that the majority of my poetry is written in.
A Murdered Child
Motionless on the concrete,
A patterned slab of grey and black
Chipped and cracked and dirty.
One day I came across a body.
Huddled, curled up into himself,
So fragile in the morning dew
That had slowly settled over him.
He looked bright in the spring sunshine,
Tawny hues and copper browns glittering.
And I wondered for a moment
That perhaps he was only sleeping.
But I knew this wasn’t true,
As I peered closer to see blood,
The fang punctures dark on his chest.
I saw the parted mouth,
As if he was still letting out his final shriek.
And the beady eyes unmoving, quiet.
I moved his broken body gently,
So small and limp in my hands,
Bones snapped and fell away.
A tiny bird, killed by the cat.
Imagery, I find, is one of the most important aspects of poetry. As an artist as well as a writer - images are an important way of communicating with an audience. The use of this device has always been my favourite part of reading both prose and poetry from a young age. It’s been something I’ve always tried to incorporate into my own writings, I want to share the things I see in my own head with others and with practice over the years, I think it’s become my strongest aspect of my poetry.
In an exercise in class, in which we were require to take an illustration and write a poem focused on imagery. After this, I was inspired to take an image and write another poem to go toward my portfolio. ‘The Murdered Child’ was based off a metaphor I had often read in books several times before: Children being compared to small animals such as mice or birds. For example, small quiet children are like mice, or others being like fawns. I recall in one novel I once read - the death of a child and ultimately the destruction of her family from that was written as a warren of rabbits being poisoned and under the ground, they all curled up into themselves and died - which I believed to be a very powerful and emotional image. But when I thought about it, I had never come across the opposite - of an animal being compared to a child.
The idea for the poem came to me when I came across a small bird my cat had brought home one morning over Easter. I scribbled down a few thoughts and what it looked like lying out on the patio before using these for a poem. Unfortunately, I though this poem was one that not everyone understood and saw that some criticized me for being too over emotional on the subject. But I do feel a great deal of sadness when my pets bring home animals. I thought the idea of the bird being compared to a human was clever and wanted to point out that animals can be as human, just as humans can be viewed as animals through the use of metaphors. After all, isn’t the small bird lying out in my garden someone’s child too?
The Balloon
You held me,
A balloon on a string.
As a child I was close,
Bobbing cheerily at your side.
Reaching up to the skies,
But never straying too far.
You held me, so tenderly.
And I grew,
The winds of age came.
I struggled against you,
A balloon too big to be held so close.
Fighting to be swept away,
To be lost in the darkness of youth.
And you held me, so protectively.
I am grown,
You unwind the cord a little.
I float further away,
Searching for my own way.
Reaching for the free air,
For my dreams, but still too close.
And you held me, so stubbornly.
Let me go,
You fear the engines of planes.
But you made me so well,
Gave me life and the courage to float.
And I will touch the stars,
But one day, I will happily return.
And you will hold me, once more.
As it is obvious in ‘One Day’ - I have drawn from my own experiences and emotions when it comes to writing my poetry. My strength comes from writing on my emotions, often negative ones and I think that the poems I write based on my own personal experiences are the more powerful ones in my portfolio. ‘The Balloon’ was a poem written for my mother and about our sometimes stubborn relationship we’ve had whilst I was growing up due to us being so similar in nature. The balloon is used as a metaphor of our relationship - I’m the balloon and my mother is represented by the person holding the balloon.
As the eldest, I was the first in my family to do many new things; I sat through my A Levels and got to University. I felt that my relationship with my mother became a little strained due to my want to push out and enjoy life and her fear of me doing new things very much alone. However, sometimes the things I wanted to do as a teenager weren’t the best - the crowds of people I wanted to be part of weren’t good for me and as I would fight against my mother for steering me away - I look back on that now as she was just protecting me. It was the complete opposite of when I was very young, where I was nigh-inseparable from her because of growing up in a single parent family.
It was a concept we both struggle with and it’s a period of life I’m still trying to come out of. While still being held, I’m pushing out for what I want to do or where I want to go. The poem is almost like a plea, as a person - I know I’ve been brought up well and I know I can go out and live life. But I need to be ‘let go of’ in order to do so. The idea of ‘coming back down’ in the last stanza was meant to reflect that although in life, we do let our children go to lead their own lives - they will come back to us. I got the idea partly from the old saying: “If you love someone, set them free. And if they return, it was meant to be.” The helium in a balloon never lasts forever and eventually it will come back down from wherever it is floating. I likened this to that some point in my life, I will return to my family once again.
One Day
they were standing
in the
dry dirt and the
sun was bright.
and it hurt my eyes
and i didn’t like the shouting.
it would have
been a nice day if
they weren’t shouting.
pressed against the
car window or
huddling against my baby brother.
i forget but i
was crying.
i didn’t like the hitting.
it would have been
a nice day if
they weren’t hitting.
and i saw mammy cry
and daddy
with his fists high up.
and the car
was too hot.
it would have
been a nice day if
the car wasn’t hot.
and we went
inside the kitchen
and outside
they were still shouting.
and i could hear the tv
dunno what was on.
it was a nice day
cos grandma
she gave us biscuits.
My poem ‘One Day’ is based from a childhood experience when I was around four years old - where I witnessed a fight between my mother and father. Around the time, my parents had split up and were in the middle of a harsh custody battle. They fought often, usually when me and my brother weren’t around - but there was still times when I witnessed things. I could be asked of why I wanted to write a poem about something like this. It was indeed a very complicated and turbulent time for a child, but looking back it felt like an important time in my life in a creative sense. It was the first time I remember feeling emotions, even though on a basic level. The sadness and fear I felt has often been a fuel for my creativity; I write sad things because it’s the emotion I’ve known the longest and feel like it’s the strongest one when it comes to writing or drawing.
Sometimes I believe this is why I find it difficult to write poetry with a more happy voice or nature, looking at all my poems I’ve submitted over the course of the module - they all have a tone of sadness. As a writer, I find this both good and bad. While I know where my strengths lie in terms of writing, I feel that perhaps I’m not stretching out to take on all tones of poetry and prose. In future, I hope that I can expand my writing horizons in order to better my skills overall.
The memory written about in the poem was probably the strongest one I can remember, but it was something I was unable to understand due to my young age. I was old enough to take things in, but still too young to comprehend the complexity of it. I was aware of the certain aspects around me like the uncomfortable morning heat of the car or the dry dirt of where we were when it happened. Although I understand more about the memory now, at the time I didn’t realise why my parents were fighting or the amount of violence used. All I knew was that it was a largely unpleasant memory. I had very simple judgement on the experience; I could tell if things were ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - what I liked and didn’t like.
This sense of judgment is reflected in the voice of the poem and the language I used to write it. In order to achieve a realistic child’s voice, I kept the words very simple and wrote the events down as I saw or heard them before making a judgement on them. My poem lacked punctuation and grammar as naturally, young children don’t possess enough knowledge to understand the proper usage of it - apart from full stops. The use of ‘and’ also reflects a child’s voice more realistically as I’ve often experienced from hearing young children talk, they tend to reel off things in lists as they speak ‘And this happened and then and I did this.’ Overall, I think that using a child’s voice and view point on such a violent and somewhat complex matter makes the poem more powerful. When being critiqued by my classmates, they all commented on the voice being the strongest aspect of the poem and I agree with this. I felt this was a poem I’ve managed to ‘get right’ the first time round on writing it and found myself not wanting to change very much of the poem save from a few words.
Brain Tap.
My brain too full
of so many things.
If I could grab a tap,
And fix into my skull,
and turn it on
so many things
would all come pouring out.
Dirty little secrets
I've kept for so long.
Moments I long to forget,
so many pretty, pretty words.
But so many other things
would come tumbling out.
I'd just lose them all.
My talents and dreams
would come spilling out
and splash down my nose,
down my clothes
and drip
drip
drip
onto the floor.
Lost forever.
Perhaps I'd be better off
just keeping my brain too full.
At least no one may accuse me
of being empty-headed.
Brain Tap’ was based from a piece of prose I wrote about a year ago and wanted to work it into a piece of poetry. It was written around the time of my final assessments last year and I felt that the amount of knowledge I’d learnt over the last year was actually making my head hurt. I thought I’d learnt too much and kind of wanted to forget some things. This is how the image of the ‘brain tap’ came to be; it was just the idea of having a tap in the middle of my forehead and being able to empty my brain. But then, as I thought on the idea more, you can’t really control what comes out of a tap - and in the poem’s narrative, I wondered what would happen if I really did possess such a thing. I’d probably end up losing everything - not just what I wanted to get rid of.
I think with this poem, imagery was a very strong aspect too. The idea of the brain tap isn’t one I’ve even heard of before and I think for someone to imagine something new when they read a poem - the idea seems to be far more poignant, they seem to pick up on it more than an image they’ve already seen before. However, overall - I felt this was one of my weaker poems, as it required a lot of work on it. I agreed with the critiques given to me on this poem - I felt like I had rambled a little and it was too repetitive on some parts. While it received a good reception in terms of imagery, I felt that there was still work to be done on it - it was perhaps not as polished as my other poems seemed to be.
Overall / Conclusion
My poems are written in free verse as I find this to be a less constricting way of writing how I feel or what I want to put across to a reader. There is little rhyme to my poems and the times where it does happen to rhyme is mostly accidental. I feel that this does work extremely well with poets and their work, often some of the wittiest and most powerful poems I’ve read - for example Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ is one of my most favourite poems and has a very strong emotional impact on me with its form as a villanelle. But when it comes to my own work, I feel like I’m forcing my words when I try to have some sort of rhyming structure. Saying this, that doesn’t mean that there’s no structure at all to my portfolio poems. Sometimes lines are repeated to enforce emotions to the reader, particularly in ‘The Balloon’ where I wanted to emphasise the emotional relationship between me and my mother.
Compared to poetry work last year, I think my writing has greatly improved and matured. In the last year, I’ve read more and begun to understand the values of poetry through the module. Through this, I think my poetry has gained more depth and meaning. I now feel like I’m not writing for the sake of writing. In the future, I wish to try and write poetry with a different voice - and attempt to come away from the often sorrowful tones that the majority of my poetry is written in.