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Content Page
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Clayton
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Procrastionation
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Desperate
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Day by Day
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A Voice
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Clayton – Draft with Peer Edits&Comments
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Clayton – Process Journal
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Procrastionation – Draft with Peer Edits&Comments
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Procrastionation – Process Journal
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Desperate – Draft
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Desperate – Process Journal
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Day by Day – Draft
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Day by Day – Process Journal
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A Voice – Draft
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A Voice – Process Journal
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Clayton
I decided to choose the theme of despair and losing hope as I thought it would be an interesting topic to choose and explore, as despair is something that I don’t often face. There is a certain feel to this topic that makes people think harder about certain things and an element of “is she really what she writes?” which I find interesting. It’s also slightly easier to think of things negatively rather than being positive, that’s what I find anyways. I wrote my first poem, a sonnet, based off of a friend whom I know and he’s going through some tough situations. Some of the phrases are taken from exactly what he’s been telling me like “lost sight of what really mattered”. He tells me of how unfocused he is on things and how he’s just living a “blank life”. And as you can tell, this is a lot of negative energy being passed onto me, so I thought I’d release this negative feeling onto my poem. It was still really hard conveying a certain feel to my poem and I find poetry extremely difficult to write. No one ever said it was going to be easy though. Also, I’m not very familiar with the format of poems so I chose to write a sonnet, because that’s the most familiar to me. After letting peers edit my work, I decided to tell a bit more of a story and make my ideas a bit more clear. I also changed the rhyming scheme a bit to make it more obvious and make the flow sound nicer. Another comment that I got was to make the theme of my poem clearer, so, as mentioned before, I added a bit more story and I’ve also changed the title to “Clayton”. Clayton is the name of my friend whom I dedicated this poem to. I was really torn between writing in the third or in first person. Originally I wrote the poem in the first person, which was weird to me because the poem is about someone else, unless I changed my whole poem into me describing my friend, in the perspective of then would my poem feel right, but describing my friend in my perspective is hard as there is a syllable count and it’d be harder to fit what I wanted to say within this restriction. In the end, I wrote it in the third person. I also switched the second and third stanza to make more sense, I though it’d be more logical to “tell a story” in order of events. I’ve changed a lot of things but I’m not too sure how to state all of them. In general, if there were phrases that sounded weird or if I didn’t like the words that rhymed for example “ dreamland” and “planned”, I didn’t think they fit well together so I changed it up. I also changed some of the lines. I felt that it would suit more if I arranged it differently and in a certain way. I think my poem represents the theme well; I think I expressed the hopelessness of my friend clearly. Writing in such a way where I express someone else’s feelings is an interesting and something new to me. I went for a simple background by using a charcoal brush which makes the whole poem look very dark which expresses my theme better.
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Procrastination (Resides Within Us) This poem, this time around, is about something that haunts me everyday and every second of my life. Procrastination. I can’t escape it and it’s something that’s a huge block in my life. Being a teenager of this century means that there is a lot of technology that can distract me and I do things that I shouldn’t be doing at the time and it ends up horribly wrong for me. The original draft I wrote for this poem is very, very different from what I ended up with. Though they seem very different, they have similar ideas expressed in a different way. My first draft actually follows along the same idea that new ideologies and technology introduced to this generation is ruining us. Though written in an interesting way, I felt that my first draft was a bit oddly written at the same time. For some reason I didn’t quite like what I wrote and I felt that it was awkwardly written and not really appealing to the ears. I rewrote it in a way where I thought it would still be interesting but also appealing to hear. I also tried to make the phrases in the photos I took this poem in a different direction where despair was shown as giving up. I edited the original draft of this poem giving procrastination a persona of a demon that destroys everything in its path. The drawing I drew for this poem is a torn down city, which is supposed to represent the things that procrastination “tears down”. It’s also supposed to give readers an idea of the state of mind after procrastination. *NOTE: The first draft’s title was “Resides Within Us”
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Desperate For this time round, I had no idea what to write and I was stuck at looking at a blank white word document and I got so frustrated. I ended up watching a TV series about high school students who murder each other in order to leave an enclosed area, which is in the form of a school. (Hear me out, it’s an interesting show) This show is where I got inspiration. One of the characters, who is my favourite, has a really interesting character. (That of a deranged psychopath) He’s a very desperate, thus the name of the title, and I summed up what I thought about his personality and the things he says. The things this character mentions are very unique phrases and he says them in an intriguing order. It fit my theme of despair so everything worked out. For this poem my peers didn’t edit my poem at all and I wasn’t sure how to change it because it’s a haiku and if you change one syllable it won’t fit the structure of the poem. I also asked a friend of mine from another school to read it over for me and he wasn’t sure how I should change it either. There wasn’t much of, well I guess there was, but it was mostly reading over and over. The only edits I made were adjustment of a few words like pathetic I changed to talentless to sound more fitting with worthless. I also changed the last line because I felt that it was a bit too bland to just end it off as “That’s who I am” so I tried to make it interesting and end it off. Though a short poem, I think that writing it was interesting and despair was an interesting path to go down.
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Day by Day I was running out of ideas for poetry because I usually don’t write more than 2 poems. I based this poem off of the idea that I’ve had in my head for a while. I felt that as the days go by, I feel like nothing eventful or interesting ever happens. I wake up, go to school, eat, come back home, finish my homework and then sleep and wait for the next cycle to happen. Not that I suddenly want to become smart and cure cancer or have something bad happen to me that I’ll never forget but rather something that makes me look forward to days? Everyday I do things for the sake of it and not really because I want to do it but because it’s more of a routine. Rather than my fond memories of a child where going to school and learning new things was a joy, they’re replaced with memories of a daily routine that I follow. That was the thinking of this poem. This poem is more about how uneventful I feel days are, as I keep growing older. I wrote this poem with a simile to start and continued it on with a sort of rhyme. It fits my theme because it has a sort of hopeless feel to it. Originally I wrote another poem, which didn’t fit my theme (What I Find Joy In), so I had to re-write this and the last poem to fit my theme. I wrote a draft for the first poem that I wrote (not on theme) and I wrote another draft for the final poem. Throughout my poem, in general I tried to find better fitting words and not let any sentences stand out. If they were too long I’d shorten it and vice versa for short sentences. This poem made me pretty fed up because I had to rewrite drafts so many times and come up with an interesting way to express my idea. For the art I took a simplistic style, which I think is simple and appealing. Being inspired by Ame, an artist that I look up to, Ame does simple sketches, which are very rarely coloured, but looks appealing which I like. Being influenced by her, I tried to draw simple art for this poem.
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A Voice (Originally “Yup, That’s Me”) I’m a really big procrastinator, as you already know, and I end up getting things done at the last minute, which puts me under a lot of pressure. Almost taking the same idea from an earlier poem, but I changed the idea into something different. I constantly tell myself that “this is what I should really be doing” but I tend to ignore it and move on with what I was originally doing and end up regretting it a lot. This is a major problem for me because as a high school student there are certain due dates to be met and certain things have to be done. Things tend to pile up and I get over flooded with assignments that I find myself not being able to do. Like the poem before, I wrote this poem in a less depressing way. Originally, I wrote this poem as a haiku but I took the same idea of procrastination and made it into a poem that speaks to me personally, also to give more of a depressed feel. I had to make a lot of changes to my poem. I made my thoughts appear in this poem and mentioned how within my thoughts, I have a choice whether I pick the choice which gives a good or bad end, and I clearly know which one is good and bad. Despite this fact, the “bad” path entices me more as it’s the easier but more painful way. Writing this poem was easier and more natural for me as it is something that I feel daily and understand. I’m not sure if the theme of this poem entirely fits despair, it has more of a “fed up” feeling to it. Fed up with myself, making the wrong choices. I gave my thoughts, not really a persona, but another appearance other than just thoughts. The art drawn for this poem is more of a simplistic style which is think looks appealing and suits the theme as well. Also inspired by the artist mentioned before. Ame does very simple art which looks aesthetically appealing. After getting the hang of poetry, though difficult, choosing despair as a topic was interesting and exploring a feeling that I don’t really feel, was an engaging approach towards writing these poems.
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