Design as Language

I view poetry as a microcosm of design, with a strong emphasis on employing form and structure, and embracing the process of revision.  In undergraduate poetry workshops, I wrote, workshopped, and iterated my work on a weekly basis.  The following poems — my final semester at Penn State — present a window into the revision process.  

I.

This form of "Career Fair" is a triolet, a very structured, eight-line poem with a rhyming scheme of ABaAabAB.  After workshopping this poem in class, I reexamined my choice of vocabulary and cleaned up clunky word and phrases (like “yesterday” and “drag their books and bags”).  I kept the 5th line as a repetition of the 3rd—but in another voice—because I wanted to emphasize the support for the students who are looking for jobs despite the lack of positions available.  While the students receive genuine encouragement in their job searches, they find the process impersonal and, in this poem, fruitless, as the end up at the bus-stop line again with their book bags.

II.

I wrote “Before the Ceremony” in the form of a ghazal, an ancient Arabic form consisting of five or more autonomous couplets.  Agha Shahid Ali, an Indian American poet who often used and wrote about the ghazal, described the form as having “a profound and complex cultural unity, built on association and memory and expectation.”

In this poem, I tried to create an initial theme (but not a defining image) with the first couplet, then follow it with reordered and new couplets that complemented but did not provide a conclusion to the first couplet.  I wanted to maintain the “disunity” of the ghazal form, so I tried not to let any couplet rely wholly on another.  However, to preserve the necessary cohesion, I tailored each couplet to imply either pressure then release, or exposure then protection.  “Ceremony” in the title refers to a wedding in the first couplet, but also employs the term as a ritual of nature or an inevitable experience.