Poem Challenge

Greetings from Kuala Lumpur! I’ve completed the challenge suggested by Adesola on her blog last week. It you haven’t already tried it give it a go. Hopefully this blog will tell you why.

At first I thought it was going to be horrendous and a big challenge. I know nothing about poetry, nothing about its form and content, and I always felt like it was a bit inaccessible. I was therefore worried that I wouldn’t get much from it. Having said that, I was keen to explore new ways to go about reflection, hoping that a new practice might positively impact the way I reflect and bring new, unexpected things to light.

At first I did find the poem writing difficult. You’ll see that my first poem is very short. I think this was in large to do with my fears of people reading it and thinking it was bad or that I was an idiot. It made me think about what David Boud writes about inhibiting reflection in his chapter in ‘Promoting journal writing in adult education’ (English and Gillen, 2001).

“The expectation of writing for an external audience can profoundly shape what we write and even what we allow ourselves to consider”

I think once I allowed myself to get passed the idea that I would be judged on these poems and realised that I didn’t even have to post them if I didn’t want to, then the whole process became much easier. I’m not a poet. I’m not pretending to be a poet. I am just looking at different ways to examine the experiences of my life to see which is the most effective for me to get meaning out of them.

So the poem writing went from being a tentative chore to something I actually quite looked forward to doing at the end of the day. I noticed that as the week progressed I became much more aware of my day as it was happening, thinking to myself that ‘this moment’ or ‘that moment’ would make a great poem. It made me focus on and remember the details that I would normally let pass me by.

I also enjoyed looking for pictures to go with the poem. It made me think about the theme of the poem. It made me analyse what the overriding emotions were and what I was really saying, and therefore gave the poems even more significance for me.

One thing I noticed about my first few poems was how negative they were. This wasn’t ever my intention but I guess is just where my headspace is at the moment. Becoming aware of this through the poetry then allowed me to make a conscious decision to try and be more positive which I think you will see in poem 4. It was challenging to write this poem because I actually had to force myself to see the positive aspects of the event. This reminded me of an earlier blog of mine on perception where I talked about my negative thoughts about an audition when I was reflecting on it. It made me wonder whether this was just a running theme for me? Do I always focus on the negative first? Is it therefore important for me to consciously focus on the positive events? David Boud writes,

“Feelings experienced as negative may need to be discharged or sublimated; otherwise, they mat continually distort all other perceptions and block understanding. Those experienced as positive can be celebrated, because they enhance the desire to pursue learning”

I don’t think that focusing the negative always blocks understanding. On the contrary, as several people said in their comments on my perception blog we focus on the negative because they are the things that need to be changed and before we can change them we have to notice them. I do think however that only noticing the negative and fixating on it can be extremely detrimental and stop you from gaining as much from the experience as possible.

My last two poems I believe were the most successful. I’m not judging them at all on their quality as poems but on the way they made me think about the experiences they describe. It is very interesting because I wrote these last two poems in the moment. They are perfect examples of reflection-in-action and as such I found that the detail in them is so much stronger. Not only do they capture the event accurately but also the emotions.

I think that one of the best and most rewarding things that writing the poems facilitates is the marrying of what happened with the way you felt about it. They made me much more in touch with my own feelings and really helped me analyse in what felt like a less intrusive way. I would describe poem writing as a gentle form of reflection that reveals deep, unexpected insights.

I won’t be writing a poem every day from now on but I will certainly be using the process again at some point. I start rehearsals for Peter Pan today so I’m looking forward to using this technique to analyse my work, although it should be said that the poems have made me realise that you can draw meaning and significance form the most mundane experience. It is just about how you view it.