My poetry is not very good; I know that and I’m okay with it. The poetry in
  this portfolio is no exception. It put a lot into it. It has moments
  that are good, but generally it is just bad poetry. This can be
  attributed to my youth, inexperience, the fact that I’ve only begun
  to read poetry and understand how it works, and my complete inability
  to get a grip or understand anything at the moment.
I’ve tried my best to make use of the poetic devices I’m aware of as I
  understand them to work. I’ve always felt that my strengths were in
  metaphor, allegory, and symbolism, but work-shopping my poetry and
  sharing it with friends and fellow poets has revealed to me that
  almost all of the intended connections and “hidden” meanings are
  either completely lost or all in my head. I was informed by Dr. Liston
  this semester that good writers don’t hide anything. They come out
  and say exactly what they mean and they do it artfully and with
  concision… but Dr. Liston is also kind of crazy.
The focus of this introduction about my use of poetic devices in my
  poetry will be on my long poem, an untitled piece that I feel is my
  strongest work this semester. With only a few exceptions,
  everything I’ve done lately has been uninspired, and bogged down by a
  sense of meaninglessness. My long poem, which I’ll just call “My Long
  Poem,” is a confrontation with that sense of meaninglessness and is
  meant to be a moderately contemptuous critique of the post-modern
  human condition, which is hopefully something that is getting
  behind us.
My Long Poem was inspired by the shocking honesty a lot of the poets in
  our class showed in their poetry this semester. Honesty is something
  I usually try to avoid, mostly because I’ve no idea what’s true. I
  decided that if I was going to be honest I couldn’t do it in a linear
  factual way, but would have to attempt to capture the nonlinear,
  nonsensical, multifaceted nature of actual emotion. I decided to
  write a series to be read in a random order, held together by recurring
  images and ideas. To do this I employed a friend of mine to design a
  website that would randomly select a section to be displayed each
  time the reader clicks on the black button. The engine that randomly
  generates the page to be displayed keeps no record of the pages that
  have already been displayed, so the reader will almost definitely
  read the same section of the poem multiple times before they get
  through all nine sections. I decided to take this route instead of a
  randomly generated order of the series to reflect the obsessive
  nature of the material.
The imagery in the poem is very surreal and often perverse because it is
  a direct conflict between the speaker and his subconscious. He is
  trying to reconcile his reason with his instinct and his desires with
  his conscience by simultaneously celebrating his basest desires
  and wallowing in his self contempt. The recurring act of counting is
  an attempt by his rational brain to seize all his attention. The need
  for a behavioral distraction that utilizes rational thought
  processes to escape from his irrational feelings of fear and guilt
  drive him to the irrational act of counting various things. I’m
  afraid that all of that is lost in the poem and the counting seems like
  just a silly attempt to tie a bunch of unrelated pieces of poems
  together.
The drastic shifts in tone and perspective are to symbolize the
  onslaught of information being directed at the speaker: internet
  pornography, blockbuster motion pictures, scribbling on the stall
  of a public restroom, the news media, the tradition of poetry, and his
  own writing. There’s so much coming at him that he’s jumbled it all
  together. Hardcore pornography is placed with literature that was
  once put on trial for being obscene, and the mother and son of God are
  placed between the legs of a lover.
The image of the dolphin is used twice to represent something good and
  clean. The first time in the body of an innocent girl that the speaker
  wants to defile, but is unable to. The second as the speaker plunges to
  his death (or reconception) in a molten lake of fire. Upon further
  revisions I want to include more water to represent cleanliness and
  repentance, perhaps a baptism. Fire and heat are the powers of his
  subconscious and the influence of a society that promotes
  consumption, greed, glamour, and lust. In one section the speaker
  wishes to endure the heat, counting the seconds to years to ignore it
  until he is turned to steel. The mechanism for change is the heat and
  molten steel, but when he falls he plunges into the water of the womb.
 
God makes several appearances in the poem. He denies God with his
  rational thought, even kills him, but turns to him during emotional
  moments of distress, addressing him directly or indirectly
  projecting him into his life. However, God is not at conflict with
  reason. There is a conflict between God and nature in his instincts
  versus his morals. God disappears with reason but serves the
  function of reason by stopping him from succumbing to temptation and
  his natural urges. “On fire with the light of life” is an example of
  this conflict. The fire of the light of life is meant to be his natural
  urge to procreate while the angel is guarding him from his sin. Again,
  I’m not sure I nailed this and upon further revision it will hopefully
  be there.
I feel like My Long Poem is pretty well conceived but not very artfully
  executed. I used rhyming in places, and it works well in the bathroom
  section I think because it sounds very silly, but I think I need to take
  a long hard look at the language choices used throughout the poem. In
  the bathroom section I also wanted to include an allusion to
  Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales but I couldn’t find my copy and I’m not
  sure I ever properly read it. I seem to remember a lot of lewd humor in
  there with creative, rhyming language.
This poem is not representative of my poetry, but I want it to be. It is
  one of three or four poems that I have begun and hope to finish. I have
  never finished a poem. I’m not sure that I ever will. It seems to be an
  endless and completely maddening thing to try to do.
The other poems in my portfolio are kind of a let down. I had a lot of
  trouble re-visioning them because I didn’t have much vision for them
  in the first place and couldn’t figure out what to say or how to say it. I
  am fond of the poem “New York is New Rome is New Greece,” largely
  because I put so much work into the original which was sewn into the
  pages of a couple of textbooks with my beard, a photo, a copy of “I Knew a
  Woman” by Theodore Roethke, and mailed to New York to someone I love
  very much. The poem was just perfect with the passages from the
  textbooks and the images. I’m afraid it doesn’t stand as well on its
  own, but I still can’t bear to touch it. Maybe I’ll come back to it when I
  have some distance.
This semester has been very difficult for me, but I’m glad that I got
  something out of it that I feel proud of.
 

 
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