The Poetry of Lost Things

This week I explored the epitaph poem. This is a poem that is intended to mourn the death of a loved one and (according to the always-right Google) it was originally intended to go on someone's gravestone. A popular epitaph poem, and one of my personal favorites, is Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabel Lee". As to be expected, epitaph are typically serious poems that explore the emotional complexity of life after loss. However, it isn't uncommon to write a satirical epitaph, which consists of melodramatics meant to give the reader a laugh.

The first challenge I knew I would have to face with the epitaph poem is that I have yet to lose someone close to me. One of the most important parts of writing is that the writer needs to interact with every piece they write in a genuine way, because the reader can tell when something is faked. Robert Frost said, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." I have come across this stumbling block a lot when writing poetry. Since poetry is so short, it is very easy to tell when the writer is forcing the poem to be what they want it to be and not engaging in an honest way. This was what made my first epitaph poem really difficult to write out. In the early part of this assignment, I become sick, my nose had become incredibly stuffed up, and I could not breathe well at night. I wanted to capture the concept of my own "death" via lack of oxygen flow. It was meant to be a funny poem, but in the end, I found the attempt to be an utter flop. I wasn't honestly engaged in with the piece and that showed in my work.

After the disaster I experienced with the very first poem of this project, I decided to put aside the funnies and try for a more cathartic poem. In this second poem, the narrator is looking at a picture of themselves as a child, and thinking about how naive the child in the picture is to the journey they are going to go through as they grow up. The poem is meant to mourn the "death" of innocence and childhood, and the desire to want to protect oneself from future pain. In truth, I have done this kind of thing before, where I'll see a picture of myself 10, 5, or even 1 year ago and think about all the trials that that person in the picture doesn't know about. Because of this, I was more engaged with the piece and it came off a lot more genuine--and, therefore, was far more successful than my first attempt.

The last poem I wrote for the project was about the narrator standing in a field of dandelion puffs and blowing one out. In this poem, my intent was to speak only be over about the physical loss (the seeds flying away) and let my diction and syntax show the underlying emotion in it all. In terms of success, I'm not sure how I feel about the piece right now, but I think there is some potential in it that I can come back to.

Thanks for reading and please, come back next week where I will be reporting on letter poetry.

#poetry #epitaph