Poetry isn’t my strongest skill because I don’t understand how to refine them properly. Growing up, my idea was that the point of poetry was it to be raw and so I never did real editing. I might tweak things slightly but I thought the beauty of poetry was in its first form. Of course, studying poetry now I learnt how wrong about that I was. I think I just had a strange romanticised view of it because I never really had it covered by anything or anyone before I got to university.

My final assessment for my poetry unit was a portfolio where we had to show our work and editing. I did pretty ‘meh’ for reasons that I was pretty sure I was struggling in; I don’t know how to refine poetry. My edits were basically cleaning the poems but that’s not good enough.

I’m going to post my poetry on here in their final forms but I’m not going to post the ‘edits’ or first drafts because I feel like they’re pointless now given how they were received. I will put my rationale here though, and expand on the poems a little as I post them.

We had a limit for our rationale and it was meant to only encompass our free-verse poems, but I think most of it relates to my experience with writing the other poems as well.

Rationale

The free-verse poems that I have submitted for this portfolio are all experimentations and were written in reflection of what I have learnt and felt during this unit, towards myself, the craft and others. The only poem not written as a reflection is the final poem about my cat, it is still experimental, however, in terms of writing in free verse. I have only really ever written in rhyme, and so these poems were about exploring free verse. For me, poetry has always been something that is created once and so I did intentionally try to make the poems a bit erratic so that I would need to draft and edit them. Editing poetry was a new practice but it helped me further reflect on what I had written and my experiences with poetry. My first poem shows my response to reading the task sheet. It is experimental and slightly satirical. The second poem was created whilst combining the experiences of two different classes to combine different parts of my life. I tried to retain the ‘rawness’ of my poetry that I believe makes it work, an example being with “kind’ve”. Though it is technically grammatically incorrect (as it should be ‘kind of’’), I wanted to show the informality of the thoughts (Australian accent, really) that went into the piece as they came, without policing them much. Though this might be labelled as an error, I felt that replacing it with ‘kind of’ made the poem strangely formal in a clunky way. The poem Hell followed the same purpose as the first, but it reflects more on my internal feelings in general rather than just about poetry. My final poem is an attempt to write something more light-hearted than the previous poems, but also to keep myself in the poetry.