31. From the End of the Semester, Looking Back

In my introduction at the beginning of the semester, I laid out the things I expected to dominate my poetry in the class: My move from NY to the South; How difficult it is for me to coincide an adoration of my friends here, while missing my best friend in NY so much; My hate-hate- relationship with obsessive compulsive tendencies.

I fully expected my poems to be laden with these themes and though, on several occasions, I started to write about these things, the poems never made it past a couple of stanzas. You all know what my poems ended up being centered around this semester.

I was rocked by the death of my aunt in February. It was expected, because she'd had cancer for over a year and a half, but she moved to GA, finally had her own apartment and then her health deteriorated suddenly, and she was gone in two months.

In a way, I'm glad I focused on this poetry now, because maybe it'll allow me to write other things in the future. Sure, I'll always feel the things that were instilled in my poetry, and sometimes a poem about it will likely surface, but I want to be able to write about things other than death. That wasn't the case this semester and in a sense, I'm really sorry about that, too. I wish I could have shown everyone that I could write about normal things, too. It got a little depressing, I'm sure, to pull out my poem each week and say, "Oh, Jenna's writing about death again! What a surprise!"

Nothing I said about my views on writing (in my introduction) has changed. I still believe you write for yourself first, then edit for other people later. In fact, this class likely strengthened that belief, because of the process of writing and then being workshopped. I loved that. I love editing and if it wasn't for my other classes, I probably could have easily spent hours on each poem I was given to critique. I adore this kind of work.

However, not everything is exactly the same as it was in January. The title of my blog is "Organized Ramblings of a Prosaic Poet." I don't know if, now, I would still classify myself that way... sure, I love prose, I plan on getting significantly better at it so I can utilize that love in the future but... maybe poetry isn't so bad.

It was exhausting to write a poem every week, absolutely. But... I have to admit, I didn't hate it. I didn't love it when this activity was taking place at 1am and I was exhausted, but, even if most of the time I was unhappy with the product, it was nice to be actively producing again.

(Ignore following cliche:) I learned a lot in this class, I'm happy to report. I don't hate forms, like I initially thought I did, and I don't hate writing poetry. I've become a more apt reader by reading every one's work every week and it's further instilled my love of editing. Workshopping was always my favorite day, so long as I wasn't the one being workshopped!

I enjoyed this class a lot, and I'm sorry to see that the workshopping is coming to an end. I hope everyone else enjoyed it, too!