Poem: Road Ahead is Closed (revisited)

Are there any girls who didn’t pretend to be a mermaid in the swimming pool?

This was the first poem that I shared on this blog. It was written during the fall semester of my junior year in college. I decided to share it since it had to deal with swimming, and I had finished describing various types of therapy and sports I had tried. All of those were attempts to find something to engage my body and work on the physical skills I needed to improve.

Before I go any further, are there people who didn’t make up scenarios when they were swimming in the pool? Role play various problems with a group of friends? Is that a girl thing or just me?

Poem: 5 o’clock on Eden Terrace

I spent a lot of time on the weekends at the lake. Well, what passed for a lake during college. The sports complex included the coliseum for basketball and volleyball games, a baseball field and many other facilities. There was also a lake surrounded with plenty of grassy spots and trees for shade. I brought a blanket, some snacks and my books and attempted to get some studying done outside. I was never as productive as I hoped to be, usually distracted by the passing ducks, but at least I got out of my dorm room.

Allusions of Myself: The making of a poem

We did these exercises in high school where we wrote ourselves a letter, most likely highlighting our goals for the future. Then the teacher collected them and maybe one year later (or five), we received them in the mail. At the time of writing, it seemed silly to write out your goals, completely convinced there’s no way you’re going to forget what’s important. But you do. The elapsed time prompts other interests and priorities. Opening that letter means grasping a piece of the past; tangible evidence of the person you were back then.

That’s how I feel with revisiting my old journals; I’m uncovering buried treasure.

I was reading through my college journals recently and came across several pages where I did some brainstorming for a new poem.

College poetry readings

So the coffee shop location where the readings happened was small like this. Not as tight quarters with the tables crammed together, but there is a similar vibe.

My second semester writing course focused more on persuasive writing. There was a structured formula to follow that included making an assertion, backing it up with examples and research, providing a rebuttal, refuting that, and then offering conclusions.

The structured part was intimidating, but I remember that it helped me see how it was possible to write a 5-10 page paper on the same topic.

I liked my professor. Something about her made me trust her judgement, not just in class but in general. Perhaps she mentioned her personal writing, offering a sense of more happening besides teaching classes. I forget how it happened, but her opinion was one I trusted and I shared one of my poems with her. She referred me to a friend of hers who hosted monthly poetry open mic nights in nearby Charlotte and edited a literary magazine.

Poem: Saw But Didn’t See

In honor of October being Domestic Violence Awareness Month, I present you this poem. Actually, it fits in well with the course of my writing because this was written at the end of my first semester of college. But maybe I should pretend that the timeliness of the content was planned all along.

Poem: Comatose

In the first few weeks of my freshman year of college, it was very dark and rainy. Aside from complaining about having to walk across campus in the rain, the logical response for me was to take this experience and write about it.

I had a rough draft and then emailed my instructors from the Write Moves program to get their feedback. The first three stanzas mostly remained untouched after my correspondence, but the rest were additions.

Addressing sensory issues: Am I sharing a problem or demanding others to change?

In the previous post I shared how the sensory modulation side of my experience with Sensory Processing Disorder is still a problem. I explained a little bit of how previous efforts to address these problems were met with unhelpful advice, especially since I didn’t have a means of explaining why things bothered me.

Now as an adult, I do have more awareness of why a seemingly random noise can have such a strong impact on me. So why isn’t it easy to tell people?

Poetic jewels of Write Moves program

Terrell Hall at Georgia College & State University

At some point during the one week program, I had a chance to sit down with one of the two instructors and talk about my writing. A one-on-one discussion. I walked away from that meeting with encouragement from him that I had real potential in pursuing poetry. Certainly some areas could use improvement, but he reinforced that my gut instincts were good.

Parler-vous anglais?

Yes, that is French for “Do you speak English?”

I was awesome at French when it came to learning new groups of words. Vocabulary was easy because it was rote memory. You just repeat it enough times and eventually it sticks.

Where I got stuck was forming sentences, specifically going through different verb tenses. I had the same kind of trouble when we addressed this in English class. Distinguishing from past, present and future is easy, but when you throw in various “perfect” tenses, things get tricky. I stumbled with properly identifying these tenses in English.

Poem: One Night Stand

No, I’m not about to admit some pretty serious information. That title is meant to be provocative.

I wrote this during my senior year of high school while sitting in the school library. I wanted to write something from the perspective of an inanimate object. This poem is an effort of viewing the poetry writing process from the point of view of a sheet of paper.