My Poetry Timeline
For over seven years I have been posting poetry on my Instagram, and for five of those years, I've been posting poetry weekly which has amassed to (at the time of writing) a total of 356 poems on my Instagram account alone. I'm sure for anyone trying to understand or explore my catalog that number is exhausting and maybe even a bit scary. It is just as terrifying to read that number for me as I am realizing that only about 15% of those poems I still enjoy.
Writing that much poetry in a little under a decade hopefully means improving in the craft. This also means that the beginning of that craft is often rough. So, as I looked back on my Instagram trying to think of ways to explain my art, I decided it may be better to give you a breakdown of my journey so far through a timeline.
So, in the rest of this post, I will be focusing on six poems that I am still proud of from various points in my poet career. I hope for you, the reader, that this may give you an overview of my catalog seeing where my writing (and maybe even my photography) have gone over the years. So, without further ado...
March 7, 2016:
I know I said all five poems I still enjoyed but this earliest poem is certainly toeing the line for me. Before getting into the actual writing, I feel the need to address the format in which it was shared.
All my early work was written on a typewriter that I had purchased at an antique store in 2015. I remember being somewhat proud of the purchase and thus I subjected myself to writing every poem on a piece of paper letter by letter with no means of correction as my hands were too shaky to use whiteout. This resulted in a few letters literally being typed over others. I would restart each poem if a mistake was too noticeable, and in this particular piece I decided to ignore the misspelling of "My" in the third stanza and write over the stray "u".
I didn't understand how to edit pictures or lighting and so my early work is restricted to slightly misaligned photos with unintended shadows from my hands or phone. I'm grateful to say that these days are long past.
My first hundred or so poems were exclusively "love poems" neither directed toward any one person nor based on any real experience as I hadn't had even had a first kiss yet. The overly corny replacement of "by" for "bye" makes me cringe and I could not try to explain to you the inconsistent use of apostrophes. The syllabic count is nonsense and there is practically no imagery. However, this poem was also my first attempt to step into someone else's shoes. I wanted to capture the sense of love and sadness that soldiers would feel when leaving their lovers behind. In a sense, I think I was able to capture that in a meaningful way and so it stands out amongst my early work as a success. It may not be near to my standards today, but it was the essence of something and I still hold "days go bye" dear to my heart.
April 21, 2018:
A large jump between years, this would be one of my last poems utilizing a typewriter. I finally started to realize the use of being able to write in any font and not have to weirdly overlay a picture of text over another picture. This also happened to be the beginning of my key motif. If you look closely in the background of the middle you should be able to see the outline of my first skeleton key. I was never quite sure why I started wearing a key around my neck but the image soon became somewhat synonymous with me in school and so I decided to make to insert it into my poetry when I could.
My art has always been seen as edgy and this poem really helps me understand why. In the moment, I never thought or think of these emotions as edgy but looking back I can see how, instead of writing a poem, I maybe just needed a glass of water and a hug.
Still, this poem did mark a few changes for me. For one, this wasn't a "love poem" in any sense. I was struggling with a strong sense of apathy that translated into me continually exhaling and hearing the "h" sound repeat in my breath. This was a huge deal for me even if, looking back, it comes across as very overdramatic. The second big change that occurred with this poem was the use of imagery. I wish I could say I had utilized similes and metaphors in my earlier work but the truth was I didn't know how to. I thought that imagery was only meant to be literal which is ridiculous to me now. However, in this poem, I began to explore that. Comparing my own body to an epic landscape was a simple start, but an effective one. I can't say that I'd ever want to write a poem like this again, but I'm glad I wrote this when I did.
January 21, 2019:
Man, do I love digital art. This was pretty much my first poem that utilized this combination of drawing, photography, and editing. While it is in no way my best, it really helped me find my footing, and as such, this picture and poem will always be one of my favorites.
Like many of my poems, this actually had a rather basic and rather trivial origin. I wanted to write about my own headspace when engaging in rest and relax exercises in my yoga class. Nonetheless, the image has a beauty to it that I feel like I caputed in both the image and the poem itself.
"To Feel Arcadia" was also my first time combining forms of poetry. Mixing together three haikus with tercets was really my first introduction to crafting my own poetic forms and I think this particular formatting worked with the poem. It helped the poem have connective tissue while also capturing that simplistic beauty that Haikus are so well known for.
August 11, 2020:
Here was when I discovered my own voice within digital art. Being able to explore simplistic images with a powerful impact (for me) was really exciting and this poem marks one of my favorite artistic moments for me visually.
I write this in preparation for college. Getting ready to leave I thought about my friends who I'd leave behind and the paths we'd all have to go on. Transitioning from high school to the real world is terrifying, exciting, impossible, and inevitable. So for me, simplifying the complexity of how I was feeling and how I thought my friends were feeling into two short lines just felt right.
Structurally, I had been toying with short poetry ever since I discovered the haiku, but this was the most simple I could get without just writing a sentence. What still makes it poetry, for me, was the use of imagery, repetition, and alliteration. Compacting these elements into a single sentence felt honest and poetic enough for me to justify its length. This form of poetry is likely not one I will continue to explore, but for how I was feeling I feel that it captured my grief and excitement in a way I could accept.
November 3, 2020:
The particular images that I placed in correspondence with this poem just cluttered space so I decided to basically remove them for the poem itself. I am not ignorant of the fact that most of my followers are not interested in my poetry. As a result, posts like this really help me feel some strange accomplishment. I get likes from the images and I get satisfaction from the poem. When the images I post draw more eyes I like to think more people read the poem too. That's what happened with this post.
Having gone to college in the middle of a pandemic and having an absolutely miserable time, I began to discover some of my own weaknesses and mental limits. At the time, I felt somewhat ignored by the world which was really just because I was isolated from the people who cared about me. In the moment, however, I wanted to visualize that feeling of unimportance and the sense that nobody saw me. Ever since, this image of a dead rabbit on the side of the road has turned into a sort of symbol for myself hence why this webpage has a rabbit for the icon.
Structurally, I decided to mimick a heroic couplet, ignoring meter and focusing on rhyme to help the poem flow and really feel like a story. I think enjambment helped this poem feel less gimmicky than previous works as the story really does flow from each line to the next. My only real desire is that I remembered a sentence at the end fo that first line and that I was more loose with the rhyming. Sometimes too much structure can be a bad thing for a poem.
November 22, 2021
Having experimented heavily with how to take picturesbetter with better lighting I found that bathroom lights or strong LED lights work best for capturing an image. While you could never tell, this photo was taken in a bathroom with a camera wedged on top of a shelf. I sat on a stool and sat as straight up to get the perfect height. Rarely do I feel like photography can capture the vivid image that I want to present for my poem so I'll normally go abstract, but this was one of the few occasions where my photography could be directly connected to the poem without just matching aesthetically.
At the time of writing the poem, and, even now writing this post, I feel strange trying to write something unique or personal. Looking at the vastness of the world around me I think that my work is so trivial and self-centered to focus on my own emotions. I wonder if I should be writing at all or spending my time doing something better for humanity such as farm work or the medical field. I do understand though, that my work can be meaningful and can have an internal impact if I'm doing my job right. So, is being a stray hair that tries to separate itself from others bad or is it really just another way to be part of a complete body?
Very rarely can I find a structure that just feels perfect for the material I'm writing but this one works so well without being too complicated. The simple act of separating the final line about a single hair from the main stanza that focuses on hair as a whole is really effective in conveying meaning visually and structurally. On top of that, the lack of punctuation really helped me create enjambment that felt natural to every line. I'll never be able to consistently write poetry like "a stray hair" but I'll be proud any time I can really capture how I feel like this.
If you'd like to check out my poetry click the link here and you'll be redirected to my Instagram.