After work-shopping my first poem, I decided I wanted to do something different with my second poem. Largely I’ve found myself writing poems about relationships, and love, I suppose, but there’s so many ways to see one topic.
With my first poem, I wanted to capture a memory, and in doing so, capture how it feels to be kind of stuck in the past. I think as a writer I’ve become accustomed to trying to fill in the gaps of my life, the areas I can’t understand or rationalize, by writing them anew in my head. This is sort of dangerous, though, and often it makes me feel like I’m trapped in those re-writings.
My first poem tried to deal with that idea. I wanted to show how memories can be addictive; they become more enticing than real life if you let them. But I also wanted to show that they’re hollow. In my second poem, I found myself still writing about relationships, but I didn’t want to write about the same thing.
I tried to focus more on indulging in vices. In the case of that poem, the relationship was more about the speaker and pain, than the speaker and the “Dear” of the poem.
Going forward, thinking about crafting a portfolio, it seems pretty likely that much of my poetry this semester will be about relationships, memories, dreams, and my relationship to all of those things. But, I don’t want one poem to bleed into the next, I don’t want them to be replications of each other. That sounds boring. So moving forward, I’m going to really focus on making sure each poem has a unique identity, even if the subject matter feels somewhat consistent throughout my portfolio.
Have any of you thought about your portfolio yet? Do you see yourself working/returning to similar ideas in each of your poems?