My First Poem for Class

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I'm taking a class called Creative Process and Imaginative Writing which is trying to mold a poet out of me.  My friend Michelle insists that I already am a good poet, but writing silly rhymes about coworkers at the movie theater is not really a definitive example of poetry. The poems I'm reading in class are all so artfully crafted, and there's really so much about the form that I don't know and don't yet appreciate, that calling myself a poet just seems ludicrous.

That being said, I am enjoying the challenge of writing poetry for a more critical audience... especially my teacher who is not afraid to point out all of the many faults that my poems seem to be full of.  He equates harsh criticism to telling a friend they have spinach in their teeth.  While workshopping the following poem in class, he found the entire first stanza to be full of spinach.  Mostly he thought it was too vague, which I can see now.  He found the imagery in the second stanza to be more concrete and he enjoyed how "of heat" was mirrored with "burned."  He also liked that those two lines broke the form of what is otherwise an exercise in accentual-alliterative verse .

Some of you who've been reading the excerpts from my novel might recognize that this poem was mostly pulled from the first paragraph of Chapter 2.  It might sound like cheating, but one of the suggestions for writing poems is to write your ideas in prose and then mold them into a poem.  Besides, what my professor doesn't know can't hurt him!

Summer
Jack Garcia

Summer’s stay,

                                with sexual fervor,

Soaked her body

                                with sun-kissed sweat.

Radiant rays

                                of resplendent sun

Warmed her

                                in wild waves

Of heat.

Summer’s stay,

                                surprisingly fleeting,

Steps aside

                                surrendering to Fall.

Living leaves

                                are left to lie

Dead and broken,

                                decaying in dirt.

Burned.