As I drafted my poem, I found myself thinking things like how can I make this sentence sound better? How can I make this poem flow better? How can I make this image clearer for the reader? Can I add an illusion, simile, metaphor, etc.? I wrote my poem about a personal experience so I tried to let truth guide me. As for deciding how to tell my truth, I did my best to include comparisons and metaphors while also making it clear what the object I was writing about represented. I had a vivid image in my mind of a sea or body of water, which represented my emotional self, with a moon reflecting on the water, which represented my reality. Having this image of this ficticious place helped me to be describe it in a way I hope was able to get an image in the reader’s mind. One challenge I encountered was a lack of clarity and over reliance on symbolism. As I drafted the poem, I tried to make it more clear. However, I sometimes found myself going in different directions, wanting to include more aspects of the reality I was writing about than would make sense in one poem. I found myself having to delete lines and paragraphs to make the poem more focused.
I wanted to include the symbols of the poem in the decorations because they were important to the poem. I tried to represent the imagery in drawings as well. Hopefully the drawings paired with the content brought the poem to life in a way one without the other would not. I included wave pictographs between stanzas to represent time flowing onwards like the waves, the deep dark nature of a depressed person’s psyche, and the fluid nature of time as the past can be a part of a person’s present like the current goes backwards as well as forwards. On the cover, the colored Aphrodite shell was meant to be the sea and the sand dollar was meant to be a moon, which introduces the theme. I think it was a different idea to include purple flowers on the back cover given I do not reference flowers in the poem. I did this because of the purple color, which is a theme throughout the poem, and also the fact that the look kind of spooky when paired with the twigs I added. I hope the shells, the drawings of images I describe, and the flowers collaged in the back cover flows and makes sense to readers. I aimed for a naturalistic synergy with the actual mementos from nature as well as the drawings of nature to illustrate what the haunted state of mind would look like if it were a place.
