Maggie Long's creative project

 Maggie Long

B Band

Self Reflection

For my creative piece I chose to do a series of poems. I found that writing out some emotions is a great way to get a point across. I also thought that it would be good for me to work on my writing more instead of drawing pictures or doing a painting. My poems are each about something different. They each express a way someone in society is feeling. Each person in my poems has something about them that really stands out to them and to others. For example, in the poem, “Road bumps”, one girl is feeling very insecure about herself because she is pregnant. She also is the only one in the school that is pregnant. Which makes it harder for her because she is then labeled as a whore. This relates back to The Scarlet Letter and Juno because when both of the main characters in those movies were pregnant, they were both labeled as whores or sluts by the people around them.

I tried to make the poems overall problem a bit harder to figure out, but it was really hard to do. If I would start beating around the bush, then the poem started to loose some meaning and it was harder for me to get the point across. I ended up making the poems last however long I felt would be good for that poem in particular. I found it to be hard to write about topics I'm not all that familiar with. I don't have a kid, I'm not pregnant, and I'm not anorexic, but to create these poems I had to be for a short while. I had to research some illnesses and how they effect people and the results of having that illness. That was one of the biggest challenges for me in this project. If I go through a problem, then I feel more comfortable talking about it because I have a pretty good knowledge on that topic. But when I'm talking about things like pregnancy and schizophrenia, I just don't know enough about the topic from experience, so I have to research it.

Some aspects of this project I think I did very well in. I got it done on time and the process was normal, also I think that the creative side to this project was also very well done. It could use more in depth analysis for each poem. I think I did a great job showing the overall problem and the emotions the character was feeling, but need to go more in depth on why and what is to come next. The way I wrote the poems went well with what the poem is trying to say. Although, some of the poems could be longer. I did 5 poems overall to make a series of short poems. Writing a long poem is hard for me because I tend to go off task and forget my topic. Another thing I could have done well in is the process and time management. I did most of this project over the last week that you gave us because I procrastinate a lot. So, I used the time we had in class to work on it over the week and then put it all together over the weekend. That's when I figured out the structure of each poem and the topic for each. Other than those small problems, I thought this was a good project to work on for the Scarlet Letter and Juno. There were a lot of things to write about for each of the movies/books.

If I were to do this project again I would choose to do a whole other project. I would probably pick something more with arts and crafts. I love hands on learning and being able to have a more interactive final product then just poems. Not to down on poems though, because it was a great experience writing them for a specific theme and being able to have such diversity in the poems. I would just like to be able to look at something without it having a definite answer to it. That makes the whole project more fun and visually appealing. Thats another thing I could have changed about this project. I could have done something more to make it prettier. It seemed really simple to me and a little too plain. I didn't realize this until after the fact though. I probably could have cut out the poem and put them all on a board, then drew around them and made them look more appealing. All in all I think that the way my project came out was good. I got the point across and did it in a different way then most people that I heard from. I'm looking forward to other projects that we do that will be like this one.