Drafty-Poem

Writing Reflection:

Looking at the difference between my first draft and my final draft, there weren’t too many changes, but I really do like the changes that I decided to make. As I went day by day, I just kept going through the draft before and switching out words or phrases that I thought might sound better and in a different drafts I would do a different combination of words. In my second to last draft, I wanted to see how it would look and sound with punctuation. I usually write my poems with punctuation but this one I decided not to and I like it a lot better without it, except for in the last stanza. I think the punctuation in the last stanza gives it extra meaning. What helped guide me was the message of the poem, I was really trying my absolute hardest to choose words that might correspond with the message or make the message more prominent or even just sound better with the message that is being said. Some of the challenges I encountered was coming up with new words, I did have a little bit of help from a thesaurus (while being cautious to not over do it). I also struggled with trying to rebreak the lines. I think I just really like how I broke up the lines originally, I liked it so much that I didn’t want to change it at all. *Also I just realized now that in my handwritten version I misspelled Helianthus every time, but it’s correct in the typed version.*

Bookmaking Reflection:

I originally picked yellow paper just because it is my favorite color, but it also worked out really well because the poem is about sunflowers. This was helpful because I didn’t have to color in the leaves yellow since they already were, I just had to color the green stem and leaves and the brown pistil and the outline of the sun. Sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers they just really speak to me on a personal level and I feel like I can relate them a lot, which is why I chose to 1) write the poem about sunflowers and 2) decorate the book with sunflowers. The content definitely influenced me to break out my artistic side. When I was in my creative nonfiction writing class on Monday, we had Professor Miller from the art department come in and give us a presentation and description of a bunch of different artist books. It was really interesting to see what the authors did to the book. Many artists challenge the book form which is the most fun part and the part that inspired me the most. I was flowing with juicy ideas as soon as we left. I’ll be making two artist books this semester: one for that class and one for this one.