One area my poetry has improved most is its ability to harness most of the emotion from what is observed. In an interview with Contemporary Literature, Reznikoff said:
"The feeling is there in the selection of the material; you pick things that are significant -- that's your feeling. You don't go into the feeling; you portray it as well as you can, hoping that somebody else reading the poem will get your feeling." -- in my annotation, I responded: whilst the submitted collection of poems at times subjects itself to an importation of my own feelings, I tried to strictly abide by writing what was observed by letting the emotion come from what was already there.Overall I am quite pleased by what I was able to achieve in year three of my own poetry writing. I believe my works have come an incredible distance from where they were many full moons ago as a study abroad student in 2012.
The first poem "Rivers Under the Sea" is as conversational as possible. It went through minimal drafting so as to not lose that bit of expression.
The second poem I have posted is one of my Reznikoff, Olson, and WCW influenced poems with several parts to it that create a dialogue with my journey into university. There a some abstractions, but for the most part it remains observational.
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Edit note: My apologies if the second poem is too small. It was the only way I could get it to fit onto a screen shot. The format of the poem is a bit strange and Blogger makes it difficult to indent things even with knowledge of HTML.
