Ian Hilton

ENGL 2260

Reflections on Revising Required Written Works
Let this collection of poems be considered an open letter to future would-be
stalkers; you may now consider yourself warned. This anthology was a rather
difficult thing to select works for, because so much of what I wrote during the
semester wasnt ever required for any assignment or homework. And I suppose
thats one of the greatest gifts an English professor can give their students: the
desire to write, even when that writing will not be graded.
Stormclouds is a body of work that has been in progress for nearly a year now. I
honestly believe that if I had not taken this course, it may never have gotten
finished. The lessons I learned about imagery and the speaker helped me take an
incoherent collection of pretty lines vaguely related to the same idea, and turn it into
one of the most vibrant poems in my body of work, anthology or otherwise.
Anemia was inspired by one of the class writing prompts, but quickly bared fangs
and a mind of its own. The one thing I desired more than anything else was to fit the
work hazarai into the poem. That was my only requirement, the rest spawned as a
result of that line.
Biography of Javier Velazquez was a required piece of work for the class, but I
included it because it taught me that the interesting parts of poems following a
particular fixed form are where the writing strays from those rules. The repeated-
line behavior of a sestina felt constrictive at first, but I quickly grew to love the form
because of the clever little changes you could make to a line from one stanza to the
next.
Small House Coffee was written at my favorite coffee shop and is really the first
piece of writing Ive done outside of my home or a classroom that I genuinely
enjoyed. Its brief and served as an exercise in making every line an image. Though it
could be redacted, Im glad I retained the line about speaking in a different language.
Because I grew up speaking Spanish, I tuned into it immediately and it was the
whole reason I even noticed the couples interaction in the first place.
Furthering the every line is an image technique, Quittance was an attempt to
describe an entire scene in as few words possible. Its only 38 words long, but
manages to bring up images of tattoos, nostalgia, loneliness, sex, and sleep; even the
title has multiple meanings. This is definitely one of my favorite poems that I wrote
as a result of the class, and Im looking forward to using the same strategy to create
more poems.
Defibrillation is the result of the most edited and revised poem Ive ever had.
Originally written as a slam piece to no audience in particular, it became the first
poem Ive ever written that reads the same way as it sounds. I tried capturing the
same energy, breathlessness, and awkward breaths that occur when reciting a poem
aloud. The poem began with the line bones splinter beneath flesh, and the rest sort
of just took off from there. The idea to make it a double entendre poem didnt really
hit me until I had already written the whole piece, so I wrote and rewrote the poem
a few times before I felt comfortable with the way the meanings were layered.
I couldnt have asked for more from the class. The things I learned are techniques
that Ill be using in my writing for years to come. This anthology is just a dog-ear in
my journey as a writer, and I hope to mark more pages as time goes on.