Poem Reflections

For the Witch of the Pine Barrens piece, I obviously really wanted to focus on the woman herself, Peggy Clevenger. To me, that name rolls off the tongue with a mixture of delight and intrigue, like there's something darker beyond the name that we are unaware. Because of this, I fashioned my poem that kept rhythmically coming back to that repetition in those short couplets, for I found that was the only way I could give the poem any sense of resolve. In that way, I tried to let the poem drift away a little bit with its longer stanzas, but I knew that Peggy was the framing device that it would always come back too, which helped in the poem's construction quite a bit. Outside of that indicator, I don't have a good personal sense of what works and what doesn't as a poet, but for the most part I was able to structure it in a way that was satisfying for me. 

My process for shaping the second Pine Barrens excerpt was mostly concerned with paring down the words and fitting them in any sort of order that sounded pleasing to me. In other words, there wasn't really a particular shape that I was aiming for, but there were a few things from the original excerpt that I wanted to highlight. In the passage, there's a certain vision of small town industrialization that I wanted to bring out, because I feel like the original piece was supposed to champion small-town values. That would still be true of the new piece, but I wanted to focus more on the actual process of this small-factory operation among the blueberry bushes rather than its people, which is part of the reason why I cut all descriptors to the network of family working inside. Other than that, there wasn't really thickly layered reasoning that went into the shape of the poem; I simply typed out words of fancy from the excerpt that struck me in the way that they came out.