Poetic 4

Esther Akintoye
April 14, 2009
Poetry – I Remember

This is an assignment that I also enjoyed. I actually got carried away because of all the memories that were conjured up while I was brainstorming. I remember how blissful these days were so it was not hard for me to make a list of memories from my childhood.

What was helpful for this assignment was that I went home for the weekend. This was very useful because I have a little sister who is still a kid. We hung out and watched SpongeBob SquarePants and did silly stuff kids do. Watching the kiddy commercials and just being with her reminded me of how it was to be a kid. So I was able to put myself back in this stage of my life and it helped me with this assignment. Although I’m grown up I still do feel like a kid.

One of my most vivid memories from childhood is Saturday mornings and Saturday morning pancakes. That is why I started the poem off this way. I tried to scatter my Saturday morning events around the poem. Also, I was a very comical kid, I still am, that laughed and played a lot. I was really active and energetic. I incorporated this aspect in the beginning of the poem. But as the poem went along I dipped down into other aspects that I can remember of my childhood. Moving was the defining aspect of my childhood. I have moved around basically my whole life and had to make new friends all the time. This was not necessarily a bad thing it just caused me to adjust to my surroundings more often than my peers. The only time it bothered me was my “third and a half move” – a move that was about to be but never was. I had a really good friend, which I did not put her name down because we still keep in contact. She is not a memory of my past but rather Idalia and Sarah are because we no longer keep in contact.

Brainard’s book was helpful with writing my poem because I used his book as a model. I referred to some of the topics he mentioned and examined his sentence structure to help me figure out how I wanted to do my own. Also, I realize how similar this assignment is to our catalog/list poem. Basically all I did was list my childhood memories. Through this assignment I learned that doing a poem can be very simple and can be like a stream of consciousness.

I tried to make this poem comfortable, something that when I read it it would not conjure up bad memories. And my ending point of this poem is that life was very liberating as a kid. But although I am no longer in this stage it still can be like this.