Poetics 1

When I first set down to write my object poem I ended up just sitting there and staring at the object for a good hour. My object was an old photograph and at first the only thing that I could focus on was the deep emotions my object elicited. At first I wanted to cry and then laugh at how different everyone looked. That was the hardest part for me not writing about the emotions I felt but rather looking at the photograph from an outside perspective. When you write about something with deep emotional meaning such as a picture it’s hard to remain just an outsider looking it. What worked for me is I would just write anything and everything that came to mind and later picked the things I thought were more focused on the object as an object.

I have written many different kinds of poetry and honestly this was the first object poem I have ever written and the process was defiantly different. I have never had to stop myself because I thought I was being too emotional or getting off topic. When I write my poetry I usually write whatever comes to mind. Since poetry to me is a form of expression I never had to worry about what someone else will think and whether it’s good enough. However, this was a great exercise for my creativity even though it was hard at first to just write about my particular object, I later learned that you can direct your creativity to flow in different ways. Even though at first this process seemed limiting it did show me my abilities to focus on something and that thing alone.