Poetic 4

Ernesto Lopez
Poetic 4

The first challenge i faced with this poem was collecting coherent memories. Once that had been completed, it was all a matter of writing down the first draft. My first draft exceeded ten pages and I spent a whole night sifting through those ten pages to refine it two and a half pages. For this poem, I let my mind direct my writing. I just wrote whatever memories appeared and in the order that they appeared. What struck me the most about this poem was the torrent of memories that it produced; memories I didn’t know I remembered, memories I’d tried to suppress and things that I could not admit about myself all came streaming through and ended up on paper. Another aspect of my memories that surprised me was the fact that most of my memories are from when I was ten years old or younger. I would have thought that most of my memories would be from the last 6 years, a period I consider the most active and most fluid. The amount of memories about baseball also surprised me because that seemed like such a long time ago even though I just quit around five years ago. Joe Brainard’s poem is a marvelous way to catalogue memories, something I’d wanted to do for years now but could not think of an appropriate way. Once I began telling my friends that I was writing a poem in this format and showed them the initial draft, they were hooked on the poem and they, in turn, wrote their own versions. I can see myself expanding on the poem I wrote and by the time I submit this poetic, I’ll have over 15 pages of memories written down.