POETRY
FEBRUARY 2021
This experiment was eventually carried out. It can be found under the "Final Project" tab.
PROPOSAL
For this experiment, my goal is to immerse the reader into my emotions and headspace when I was severely mentally ill. In doing this, I want my audience to understand mental illnesses better, especially eating disorders. Eating disorders are the deadliest mental health illnesses and in my opinion, the most complex. It’s a fight against your most primal instinct: to survive by fulfilling your hunger drive. Because of this, eating disorders are very misunderstood and stigmatized, and I want to help change that. A high percentage of people with eating disorders also have at least one mood disorder, and I also want to show how depression, anxiety, and eating disorders work together and make it extremely difficult to seek help and get better. I really want my reader to be able to feel what I was feeling, or at least understand it. Because of these goals, my intended audience is people who are mentally healthy, those who have never suffered from mental health illnesses before. It may be difficult to get them to feel the way I did because in my experience, depression and anxiety are not emotions, they’re more like a frame of mind, but I feel as if the genre I’m choosing for this experiment will make this challenge much easier to overcome.
The genre I’m choosing for this project is poetry. According to britannica.com, poetry uses specific language arranged in an intentional way to evoke an emotional response or “imaginative awareness” of what’s being written about; common elements of poetry include sound and rhythm. This makes poetry perfect for my goals: I want my audience to feel something, and poetry is intended to make people feel something. I can achieve this with poetry through the tools that poets have in their toolbox, such as line breaks, line length, enjambment, rhyme, meter, the shape of the poem, and much more. Because poetry essentially has no rules or restrictions, I would be able to manipulate the poem(s) however I want and make full use of the modes that poetry affords: visual, spatial, and possibly even aural (since poems are meant to be read aloud, and poets often choose language with the sound of words taken into account to enhance meaning). With regards to the visual mode, poetry would allow me to use bold, italics, underlines, font size, font, color, and more. With regards to the spatial mode, poetry allows the writer to manipulate the shape of the words on the page through caesurae, line length, line breaks, stanza breaks, and more. With regards to the aural mode, poets can choose language that has consonance, assonance, long vowels, short vowels, liquid consonants, and mute consonants to affect the sound of the poem. Making use of all these tools would aid me in my goal to make the reader feel what I felt and understand mental illnesses better. For this experiment, I would either write one long poem or a series of shorter poems. This would depend on which one would be most effective for the memories I choose to write about should I fully realize this experiment.
If I were to carry out this experiment, I do not anticipate needing much technical assistance. For skills, aside from the tools I mentioned above, the one I would potentially use is defamiliarization—making my reader feel as if they are going through a habitual experience for the first time. I would also use concrete language rather than abstract language to evoke emotions and every choice I would make throughout the poem would be intentional. I might need people to read various drafts of my poem and consult them about how my choices affect their reading experience, and those people would probably be my group members. I anticipate that carrying out this experiment would take a couple of weeks at least, maybe a month. I would need time to create multiple drafts and think deeply about the choices I make within the poem(s), as well as experiment with the effects of different choices.
REFLECTION
For my experiment, I chose narrative poetry as my genre because when I chose it, I felt it was the perfect genre for my experiment. And, after going through this experiment process, I still feel that way. My project topic surrounds various mental health disorders, and my two main goals for my final project are to immerse my reader in my experiences, and to make the reader feel emotions that I felt. I want to be able to do this in a narrative style—by telling stories of memories that I have while I was having severe mental health issues. All these goals I have for my project fit the purposes of narrative poetry.
Not only does narrative poetry perfectly align with my goals, but I feel like it fits in with my writing style. I do not like creating longer pieces; instead, I like writing shorter pieces that are more purposeful. By that I mean I like being intentional about all the choices I make, including word choice, syntax choices, selection of detail, and more. Because poetry is a genre that has limits—a line can only be as long as the page is wide—it requires intentional choices with all the words and punctuation on the page. But, with poetry, the amount of tools you have in your toolbox is much larger; there are so many more choices to make. Poetry is a descendant of song and is intended to be read aloud, which means that poets are able to make choices with regards to sound to reveal and enhance the meaning of the poem. They can use consonance, assonance, muted consonants, and liquid consonants to have the reader associate sound with a certain emotion. Rhymes also come to play in poems: near rhyme, slant rhyme, end rhyme, exact rhyme, and more. Poems are also much more visual and spatial because poets can use caesurae, stanzas, offset lines, and line lengths to alter the shape of the words on the page.
Poems really don’t have many, if any rules, which is a stark contrast to the genre my origin piece uses, which is an essay. Essays do not rely on aural—essays are not descendants of songs and are not necessarily intended to be read aloud, like poems—or spatial modes—essays have a pretty fixed form—nearly as much as poems do. It is relatively rare for essays to significantly involve sound such as rhymes or to stray from the standard display on the page: margins are usually even, paragraphs are separated, even spacing between lines and words and paragraphs. In these ways, an essay is just too conventional for what I really want to convey with my topic.
Despite the fact that we have two more experiment cycles to go through in this class, I am completely confident that I will end up pursuing narrative poetry as the genre for my final project. Narrative poetry will allow me to achieve everything I want to achieve, and I can achieve it with a vast, unique set of tools to make every choice in my poem(s) intentional.