Towards the end of my academic journey, during the second semester of my senior year, I wanted to solidify my descriptive, metaphorical, and formatting skills. I joined Dr. Zurawski again for her Advanced Creative Writing course, which focused primarily on poetry.
One of the assignments we were given was to write poems based on the artworks available in the “Magical Realism” exhibit at our university art museum. While I intended to evoke the art’s visuals in my own poetry, my goal wasn’t simply to reflect but also to recontextualize. I thought about how I identified with the work, and, consequently, I found myself writing as though I were peering through a window.
I initially had to rush through writing these works in a class period, and then I went back and revised them a few times. Overall, I feel I was successful in reflecting the visuals of the work. I think that I represent my observational process through my poetry. My enjambment matches the way my eyes scan through the artwork. Through that imitation, I think I’m able to create a contemplative cadence. I am happy with the metaphors I used in these, but I think I could have gone further and used extended metaphors to pull more of myself into the piece. That would have helped to give them more of a personal identity.
Though this was a different assignment than my previous work, I found that I still exercised the skills I had developed over the course of my journey. I learned to see this artwork as a text that I could modify and have a conversation with. The sense of pacing and cadence I derived from my experience with dialogue and narrative pacing. My attention to set design in my dramatic work aided in my observational skills here. Likewise, learning to re-examine what exists and to provide new perspective to what exists no doubt helped to enhance my creativity.