Project 3
He
He brings a mischievous atmosphere into every room
His smile’s an underlying smirk
Always suave, swift, with excellent wit
Lightly teasing, but never berserk.
‘Though he may look lackadaisical,
His eyes hold a sparkle of wonder
He tightly grabs onto the speckles of intellect,
The information satisfying his hunger
He never seems to grapple with sorrow,
Oh what a life it must be!
Living a life that’s so jovial and free
I wish I could be the same as He.
The Record
It was around seven thirty when I found it
poking out of the disarray —
Beyond the shelves in the basement,
That attempted to mask the clutter
The shelves themself weren’t difficult to move,
so I pushed myself on through
Stumbling over forgotten papers,
and once on top of the pile, taking hold of it.
It was light, smooth, thin,
with layers of dust coating its dark surface.
I flipped it over only to see the label:
10/13/49
I snuck back out from the shelves
placing them in their correct positions.
Taking the record — hidden under my shirt
to the car and out into the night
Expecting a melody the needle was placed,
but no music was found in the grooves
Instead was a Cacophony of noise
erupting into the room.
Clamping my ears I moved to the dial
making the volume tolerable,
and with a curious touch,
listened again to the sound
Conversations distorted, fragmented, blurry
with a jolt of disappointment I went up to bed.
But as the record began to stop,
the voices did not end
The Art of Thinking
How do you gather your thoughts?
Through a list, fate, narration?
¿Tú haces sus pensamientos hablan inglés?
Or do they have a voice at all?
Our thoughts, our conscience, living within the mind’s eye
Walking in between the veil;
Both living yet nonexistent.
Both visible yet imperceptible.
Not quite a reflection of ourselves
Tugging on my insides,
Warning me against terrible actions,
Playing devil’s advocate in the face of uncertainty.
Thoughts can be words, pictures, voices
Beings with personalities
思考は多くの言語で私たちに話すことができます
Guiding our perception throughout life
Artist’s Statement:
I was able to demonstrate a variety of skills (fine tuning some of them along the way) during this project. After considering the experiences I’ve had during Projects 1 and 2, I decided that poems would help me improve my newfound skills. The first poem uses both third and first person for the POV, while incorporating a perspective from the first person’s voice to describe someone else. Up until the last line of the poem, I wanted the reader to feel as if it was written for a romantic purpose, and not as a yearning to share personalities. This added a dash of dramatics to what appears to be a simpler poem. In general, the third person POV is more difficult for me to write, so I challenged myself to step out of my comfort zone. The second poem was the most fun to write, encompassing a slight horror element into the story. I was inspired to write this style of poem from the podcast: The Magnus Archives, which I started listening to this week. This poem is written from the first person POV, with a perspective that predominantly focuses on the main character. I wanted to keep the voice unsuspecting, with a dash of curiosity. However, adding in background descriptions helped foreshadow the fact that the object was not what it seemed to be. I normally don’t write poems as long as this one was, but I wanted to make sure that the correct effect was able to play out for the reader. The last poem was from my voice and perspective. Thoughts have always been intriguing to me, so I decided to encompass my own insight on the matter. I wanted to have somewhat a mirror effect, going from questions to answers. I also wanted to address the diversity of thought, leading me to incorporate one line of spanish and one line of japanese. This could potentially be a risk, since this is an English class, but I feel as though the lines helped move the story along in a beneficial way.
Some challenges I faced throughout this project were ideas and time management. With timing, part of it was uncontrollable and the other part was myself. These past couple of weeks have been extremely busy, with presentations, tests, interviews, scholarship deadlines, extracurriculars, and work filling up my days and nights. Because my school is not doing midterms this year, the teachers have been providing us with extra tasks to make the same effect of a midterm happens over a longer period of time. Besides that, I procrastinated a bit, trying to get more rest than I needed to take in order to get this project done in a timely manner. In the past I’m usually able to find the sweet spot, where you don’t start right away but leave enough pressure to work effectively, but my tiredness clouded my accuracy to find this sweet spot. I was able to finish the project before the due date, but it took a single work period and not several smaller work periods to do so. With the conflict I had with ideas, I just want to remind you that I do favor my own creations over emulating someone else’s work. However, starting the process to get ideas out of my brain is more difficult than perceived. I’m glad that I was able to gain inspiration from The Magnus Archives. That inspiration is what pushed me over the first barrier, making the rest of the process smoother along the way. From that point on the poems came naturally to me.
.In the end, I feel as though I was able to create a project that I am proud of. I went out of my comfort zone and conquered the challenges that were thrown at me. I was able to learn more about POV and voice. These poems are some of the best original work that I’ve written in a long while, and I hope that you enjoyed them as much as I did once they were finished.
