English Education

Somewhere

I guess the idea behind Somewhere was that it was a challenge for me to get better at my poetry. My friend Lizzie had said once that she did not like writing, but that she would read a ton of my poetry if I wrote more simply because it was so pretty and dreamy. 

I did try to write poetry in high school. There was a girl named Meagan S. who I met a summer drama camp. She wanted to become a screen-writer. She wrote very scary one-shots on Blogger, as well as poetry. She had a big following. Meagan started to gain confidence in screenwriting - a portion of the NaNoWriMo website dedicated to screenwriting at a different time of the year. I think the experience in screenwriting, monologues, and prose helped her to become better in poetry. She wanted to be like Sylvia Plath. 

If you walk into any Barnes+Noble right now, you would see  variety of different styles of poetry - Sarah Kay's traveling, Lang Leav's wistfulness, or Amanda Lovelace's literary references. 

I hated the poems I wrote in the past. As a teenager, I suffered with clinical depression. A lot of my poems were "wistful romantic" and "gothic-romance" sounding. There was also a lot of depressive writing on Tumblr at the time, which looking back now, was obviously unhealthy to everyone involved. Writing about how depressed I was, according to my therapist, made me more depressed - which was the reason I didn't do it. 

I was coming out of a bad relationship while being infatuated with someone else. I've always leaned on the "New Age / 'Magical Thinking' (Psychiatric wording)," so I supposed it was an eventual "preparation" for what I thought would be the next relationship via positive affirmation. 

I've always wanted to do things for the sake of doing it. Looking at living_is_dying's Poetry of 100 poems, I set down to write my own 100 poems. 

I listened to different, random songs on pandora, and started writing whatever feelings or thoughts came to mind. 

Somewhere isn't' necessarily a good book of poetry, and I'll tell you why - I've never written poetry before. I had this notion that all which these poems needed was to be a certain length, so I combined smaller poems to make a bigger poem (thinking that, like Shakespeare's sonnets, 400-500 words or more is the proper length of a poem. 

I deleted 50 of my poems, before writing another 50 more to make all the poems relate in a  cohesive story form. Does this sound crazy? i didn't think they sounded good enough - that they weren't "smart" enough poems. Now I know it's how well you express your intended feeling within a poem / not how it sounds - that is why so much poetry is more powerful when it is trying to be raw emotionally rather than sounding a perfect way. This is why, I'll probably never consider my book a good collection of poems.