ERN for Sweet Child of Mine Do you ever have an experience and you say in your head, that

would make such a good poem or I would love to write about this, but it takes you months to write something of substance down? That was me during Sweet Child of Mine. In July/August I took a trip to Ghana, Africa to work at an orphanage for a few weeks. This experience was unforgettable, but trying to captivate those images and feelings into one condensed poem was confusing for me. I feel like I couldnt properly put into words my experience. There were plenty of one-liners and bits that I wanted to say, but would never be able to be transcribed from a generic reader. Sweet Child of Mine was my first attempt at writing this supposedly heartfelt piece. The goal of this poem was to express my own feelings on taking a child out of their culture. The children of Ghana love their culture and embrace the lives they live. I wanted my statement to stand firm in the ideals that if they are not in danger, the children should be raised within the confines of their own culture. They respect it too much. Two over arching themes of this poem are respect and humility. I stretched my artistic limits with my second revision for Sweet Child of Mine. I added an opening section that expressed, with a great sense of candor, the difficulty I had writing this poem. While this may not belong in a poem, I know I appreciate it when a poet explains their process/motives behind their stories. This addition of honesty builds the character background and strengthens the relationship between the speaker and the reader. It also allows my to continue writing drafts with this candor, regardless of whether I keep it or not. A common theme within all my poems is the sense of a scattered brain. I jump from one item to another without any transition or warning. As we learned this semester, there needs to be a careful flow of the page. The problem with implementing those transitions into this poem is that I wrote it as half a poem of standard verse and half a poem made up of journal. An example of these uneasy jumps is The demand to be / noticed. / From the beginning I opened up a piece of paper. In this third draft, I made it a personal challenge to create a seamless flow. I also noticed that there were many places where I had speeches, so I went though and italicized those to make them stand out a bit more. With this poem being a piece centered on a trip to Africa, I though it was important to make sure that the musicality and rhythm of the poem was attended to. I normally would be more interested in the sound sense and the correlation between content and sound, but given the history of this poem, rhythm seemed to be the area that most connected with the content. In the African music that I was able to experience, the beat seemed to contain a series of beats followed by smaller beats, then a long pause. It is very drum orientated. I tried to recreate this by having the line breaks contain the proper rhythm and then using the note-like interjections as the breaks.

Distance is key with Sweet Child of Mine. While, it took me 6 months to even begin writing down my thoughts, it will take me much longer to be able to ever feel satisfied in my explanation of this experience.