Poetry Book Project Finalized

/ 6 October 2008

Today at 10:20 am (to 11:00 am) I had the finalization for my Poetry Book Project that has been the better chunk of what I’ve been doing since school began. The project consisted of a few things. The first step (that I did ahead of the approval even) was researching Creative Commons. This I did as a side component to the main poetry book project. I had actually completed the creative commons research before the approval occurred. The second step that I did was to research the basic elements of poetry and apply those to smaller tasks. I then researched 3 specific types of poems. Those were Haiku, Villanelle, and Italian Sonnet. I spent my first whole day of writing poetry simply writing many many haikus. It was clear that the haiku was to simple to not be an expert at it already. The second form of poetry that I spent a day practicing and getting right was the villanelle. These poems I found quite a bit harder to write, but I didn’t as much enjoy the repetition that forms the center component to the villanelle. The italian sonnet was quite complex, but I felt like it would be a good form to pursue to become an “expert” at. The better chunk of the time that I spent revising my 30-some poems was spent reworking 2 of the sonnets so that they’d closely resemble (closer than my first drafts anyway) the actual sonnet form. After that stage I took some time off on the poetry to write up the secondary deliverable, an essay on Creative Commons. That was just a one day break and then I spent a day thinking about poems, but in truth writing the extra content for my poetry book. I spent the rest of the in-class project work time just putting together the content for my poetry book. Just this past Saturday my dad helped me with the reformatting of the book to better fit the way in which I wanted to bind it (using string and a glued-on cover sheet). We (my dad and I) then spent all of Sunday evening actually printing and binding the poetry book. All in all the project took 63 hours and 5 minutes in and out of school (though more of it in school). My reflection on this project can be found at my website. All this is linked off of the central project website. Enjoy, Alex.

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