Madelyn Keslar

Keith Kopka
CRW 3311
23 April 2015
Statement of Aesthetics
I learned a great deal about poetic technique in this class, which is good considering the
name of the course. While I do not think I got my thoughts out enough on paper for my poetic
techniques to take hold and work for the poems, hopefully some of those techniques will be
demonstrated better in my final drafts of my poems. James Wright, Bob Hicok, Carolyn Forch
and Robert Hass were some of my favorite poets from our poetry packet. I think they all had a
similar tone to their writing, which I cannot really find a way to describe, but will go further into
the stylistic elements that I appreciated and aimed to attempt in my own poems.
In his poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffys Farm in Pine Island,
Minnesota, James Wright describes all of his surroundings as if hes been lying in a
hammock for forever, and then, out of nowhere, almost, says I have wasted my life. I really
appreciate his ability to connect the extensive description of his surroundings that is twelve lines
long to the single last line. The last line puts the rest of the poem in perspective. I attempted this
in some of my poems; I tried to include short but strong observations in not-so-strong stanzas in
order to solidify a metaphor, but I think what works for Wright is that his poem isnt necessarily
a metaphor at all. Its just scenery. Were tricked into thinking hes describing a beautiful setting,
but really, what hes getting across is that his life is boring. That the setting is boring. And that
there is no grand metaphor behind it - he simply thinks he really has wasted his life. And this is
what makes it so great in its simplicity.

I learned a lot about connecting ideas and scenes from Bob Hicoks Her my body. The
poem, containing a husbands thoughts on his wifes possible breast cancer, connects his wife
drying her hair to the sound of a hairdryer, and this to the sound of the engine of an airplane, and
this to the image of them flying to Brussels. Hicok also repeats a certain line throughout the
poem: I am (also) working on this/a theory. The repetition of this line really stuck with me. Its
sort of different than the tone of the rest of the poem, and repeating it give it more importance
when we see it again in the second to last stanza. The second to last stanza is also the strongest
and holds the most weight in the poem, finalizing the idea behind the poem, and Hicok descends
just ever lightly from this high point in order to leave us satisfied with the ending. This was also
very noticeable to me and I attempted that in my writing, (but did not really do it well!)
I loved Carolyn Forchs The Colonel. The experimental poems in this class were by
far my favorite, however I think that I was very intimidated by them, so I didnt attempt them
apart from my final poem. The form of the entire poem is one giant stanza that builds off of
previous sentences and plays on words. Robert Hass also wrote an experimental poem called A
Story About the Body, which was very open for interpretation. It ends with he found a
small blue bowl on the porch outside his door... he found when he picked it up that... the rest of
the bowl -- she must have swept the corners of her studio -- was full of dead bees. This was so
unexpected and strange, yet you know that there is some sort of metaphor or symbol there for
every reader, and the open interpretation of this poem and its slightly frightening ending made it
stick out to me in our poetry packet. I attempted to insert slightly different images into my
experimental poem (if you can call it that), yet I think that I perhaps used too many, and they
didnt mesh well together in order for the reader to flow from one idea to the next smoothly
enough.

I think that my main issue, overall, in all of my poems was that I shared a lot of ideas, but
did not demonstrate my reasoning behind them according to the actual details of situations. I did
not give the audience enough information for them to understand things or conclusions that I was
jumping to, stylistically or otherwise. I hope that I improved upon this in my final drafts, and to
improve upon this in the future, using my favorite forms and techniques of James Wright, Bob
Hicok, Carolyn Forch and Robert Hass that I discussed above in order to do so once Ive
clarified what is going on in the poem.