Ashley Bobman

Frances McCue
Honors 394A Reflection
1 June 2013
My Journey with Poetry
Many times in class Professor McCue explained that the difficulty in writing good
poetry lies in the revisions. Often once a good satisfactory draft is written, a poet tends to
be reluctant to change it.
My first triggering town poem proved to be one of the greatest struggles for me.
Not only did I have trouble writing this poem, but I feel I was unsuccessful with my
revisions. Since the version of The Secrets of Mercer Island that I submitted was my
fifth draft, I was reluctant to revise it any further, although I knew it was necessary.
Because this was my first poem for this class and the first revision process I underwent, I
feel that this poem could still use improvement. However, I am lost on where to go next.
Although I went back multiple times and tried to make additional revisions, I still am not
satisfied.
Some of the difficulty with writing the letter poem came from deciding to whom I
should direct it. In fact, I originally wrote a poem about a fire alarm at 2 am on
Valentines Day and after the third draft, I realized I hated it and scrapped the entire thing
(I included this with my other letter poem). Then I decided to use this poem to talk to
someone with whom I was afraid to be honest. However, as I wrote the poem, it didnt
come to express the feelings I hid. Instead of allowing music to conform to that truth, I
let music shape the direction of the poem and thus I feel proud of my final draft of Letter
to 18th Street from NE Campus Parkway. When I imagine it read aloud, it paints a very
dramatic scene.

When revising Degrees of Neon in Vegas I returned to the comments made by

my peers about adding more neon images; once I had done this, I realized I was
unsatisfied with the somewhat happy ending I originally intended for the poem. Thus, I
took into account the feedback I received about how it sounded like the speaker was
paying with cash, not that he decided to leave before doing something he would regret.
This inspired me to change the ending to reflect the idea that paying with cash removes
any ties to the actual person. The flow and overall tone of the poem greatly improved.
After the outdoor activity, I went back to my dorm and sat down with my notes,
yet I could not seem to write a poem. However, when the fourth assignment came around
and it did not have a specific requirement, I decided to revisit those notes, and thus I
created A Huskys Foundation. This poem was supposed to be about how poetry
should not be taught as a how to like it often is in high school something I learned
from Frances McCue. However, I had a lot of difficulty with this poem because I had too
many messages I wanted to get across. I am still not content with this poem, but I dont
know how to fix it without scrapping it and that idea scares me.
Despite the struggles and triumphs I encountered when revising my poems, I
managed to write many poems throughout this course, four of which I have included
various drafts of in this portfolio.