LITR 3731 Creative Writing UHCL sample student poetry submission 2008

Bethany Roachell

AMBIVALENCE

I’m waiting for you to come back to me.
Fingers digging into your skin
and I am waiting for you to react,
turn around and face me. Give in!

If you’d just pick me up, back off the ground,
maybe I could forgive you then.
We will remind each other how to love—
with arms wrapped around your neck when
my feet are swinging lazily mid-air.

We’ll ignore everything else but the spin,
forget what we should remember.

But pasts will haunt us, what had been,
getting in the way of what we cherish.
It was our temptation, our sin
that brought us together in the first place.
So we stop… only to begin
with this merry-go-round of emotions.

BEAUTIFUL ONCE

What’s so beautiful about this body

people love to look at,

hate to touch?

Flat planes, bones just out,

It is sharp, angular and uncomfortable.

This body you call beauty has no soft curves

to fill your hands—

there is nothing to hold on to.

Maybe that’s why I’m easy to discard,

to forget, to throw away and leave behind.

It’s a mess, the jagged parts of me—you broke

the pieces you said you wanted

but left without worry (care? love?).

There is not much here, I guess—

so easy to overlook.

Still—

you said beautiful once.

Revision Account

I wanted to write something different than what had been written in class beforehand. Something strong and solid and which pulled on the emotions. Though I’ve always been told that I could write about any type of subject in the world, I have also been told to write what I know. Relationships between people are something that has always interested me. I like to watch a lot of movies and read books that deal mainly on the relationships between family, friends, acquaintances, enemies and lovers. Something about the equation of every single relationship in everything I have read and witnessed in my own life has captivated me and through my poetry I like to express what I see.

For what I used in class I took a more recent experience still fresh in my head and heart to share with the class. Most of it was from my own experience and some of it was fabricated. I shared these two poems in class that originally read like this:

AMBIVELANCE

I’m waiting for you to come back to me.
My fingernails are digging into your skin
and I’m just waiting for you to react,
give in, turn around, and face me again.
If you’d just pick me back up off the ground,
maybe I could forgive you then.
Remind each other what it’s like to love.
Arms wrapped around your neck when
my feet are swinging in the air.
We’ll ignore everything else but the spin,
forget what we should remember.
But pasts will haunt us, what had been,
getting in the way of what we cherish.
But it was our temptation, our sin
that brought us together in the first place.
So we stop… only to begin.

BEAUTIFUL ONCE

What is so beautiful about this body

people love to look at,

hate to touch?

Flat planes, bones just out,

I am sharp, angular and uncomfortable.

This body you call beauty has no soft curves

to fill your hands—

nothing to hold on to.

Maybe that’s why I’m easy to discard,

to forget, to throw away and leave behind.

It’s a mess, the jagged parts of me—you broke

the pieces you said you wanted

but left without worry (care? love?).

There is not much here, I guess—

so easy to overlook.

Still—

you said beautiful once.

The first poem, “Ambivalence”, is about an on again off again relationship. It is about two people who cannot seem to make up their mind about each other. Both love and hate are present in the poem and the true sense of mixed emotions is what I was trying to put on display through this poem. I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do with this poem but it still needed some work for it to reach its full potential.

Some of the criticism I received about this poem is that it happened really fast. It was concise and compacted with so much information in so very little space. Some people wanted me to slow it down, separate it into stanzas and take out words here and add different words there. I was even given some other title suggestions to make it more my own instead of this single worded title. Some of the strong points that were pointed out were the fact that I can pack so much meaning in such a simple poem and some of my strongest lines within the poem were the simplest ones.

Reading it, rearranging it, numbering the lines and truly thinking about what I was trying to say, I ended up with what you see at the top of this page.

I separated the first stanza from the rest of the poem to slow it down. It separates what the narrator of the poem wants to happen and what does happen. She wants her significant other to stop running away and to stay put in her arms. However, the rest of the poem shows what really goes on and what keeps them from being able to stay easily together.

I took in consideration some of the things I should change. Mostly the wording of certain lines; for example; lines four and five. Originally four and five read: “give in, turn around, and face me again. / If you’d just pick me back up off the ground;” to what it reads now: “turn around and face me. Give in! / If you’d just pick me up, back off the ground.” It helps the poem flow well and changes the meaning just the slightest bit that makes the speaker seem more yearning than she did the first time.

Also, I fixed the rhythm of the poem. At first there was no set beat to each line but now starting with the first line, every other line has ten syllables. Starting with the second line (all the rhyming lines) has nine syllables.

A few people in class mentioned how this poem seemed like a merry-go-round (it was even a title suggestion) but instead of using it as a title I added the idea of it in my last line. It might make the poem a little bit more uneven than it was but it also helps slow it down and put the underlying theme into place.

I really like how this poem turned out: different and uneven, like a relationship in this definition always is.

As for my second poem, “Beautiful Once,” I wanted to use an extended metaphor of what I see from time to time. The body in this poem is supposed to represent the capability of love and then the “I” later in the poem is representing narrator and how that person has been affected by loving.

The suggestions given to me were to try it centered so the reader can get a better feel of the jaggedness I mention in the poem, to make the lines “this body you call beauty has no soft curves / to fill your hands” into something more firm and stable (like a rock climbing wall) to help with the imagery of the body being something you can hold. It was even suggested to change the line in the earlier poem where I supplanted the “I” earlier to say that “I am sharp, angular and uncomfortable” instead of the body.

I didn’t change the “soft curves” like what was suggested because I envisioned the body as a woman. What people find attractive about a woman are her curves, a sign that shows she has the ability to give birth and supply nurture for babies. Using an image of something more like a climbing structure with footholds and ridges does not work because it takes away from the nurturing image a woman usually has.

I’m not sure if I like the poem being centered (probably because I had it left aligned for so long) but I do understand the need for the jaggedness on both sides of it to get the point across on how sharp it can be so I decided to keep it centered.

Though the changes in this poem are minimal, I do believe more of the meaning can be seen more now than it could in the earlier version.