Growth as a Poet Reflection

At first when I just started writing my poem, I struggled with finding the right words to convey
my emotions and make the reader feel my words. I struggled with using descriptive words in my first
draft of my poem. For example, in my first draft of my poem, I used boring words such as lonely, mess,
etc, and I had a hard time trying to make descriptive lines. By using expressive language in my work, I
was able to put the reader in my shoes and envision what I went through.
One of the biggest and most important changes I made in my poem was making the poem longer.
Throughout the entire critique process, I got feedback from multiple classmates and teachers and one of
my main goals was for me to be able to improve my poem by not only changing words and creating better
lines but also by making my poem longer and more emotional. When looking at my first draft, you can
see that my poem consisted of only 2 stanzas and my final draft of my poem was a total of 4 stanzas. By
adding two more stanzas into the poem, it allowed me to speak my thoughts and be more vulnerable to the
reader. By being able to be vulnerable in the writing of my poem, it allowed me to be raw in my video
presentation.
Another change I made that I found important was creating more emotional lines throughout my
entire poem. For example, in my first draft I wrote “The only thing left was my lonely bed. My lavender
walls repainted back to white,” and later on after multiple critiques, I was able to successfully change
those lines along with many other ones. In my final draft of the poem, those previous lines turned into the
lines “My resting area, bare with no sheets, the only remaining item in my room. My lavender walls,
remnants of my youth, are repainted back to white,”. With this change, I was able to illuminate the feeling
of being erased from the only home you ever knew and I feel like that change helped the poem feel
meaningful and more personal. While adding those personal touches, it also gives the reader insight into
the sadness that was brought upon my family and I.
My last important change that was made was adding in more poetic devices. In my first draft, I
lacked poetic devices, only using about 2-3. When Lori first critiqued my poem, she told me to get rid of
the cliches and to go more into detail with the imagery I was trying to incorporate. The second line of the
first stanza alone was a total cliche all in one. In order to change that, I needed to come up with better
metaphors instead of the boring kind like the ones I wrote at first such as “My heart sank, thoughts rushed
through my mind, my world collapsed all at once,”. In my final draft, I was able to write my metaphors as
“My heart was an anchor, Thoughts rushed back and forward through my mind like a hummingbird in
search for a flower, My world was an old historic building, collapsing all at once,”. It is more descriptive
and shows the reader the effect everything had on me. While fixing my metaphors, I was also able to
improve my imagery by describing my bedroom walls being painted over and how the bedroom was
going to haunt me for the rest of my life. By doing every single one of these changes, I was able to create
a poem that I never thought I could find the right words for.