week #11 critical #2

So spring break is the week that most of us will probably be getting our barriers together and start to work on our poetry collections. I think back to when I heard Natasha Trethewey speak last week and she went into depth of why she choose certain pieces to place in her collection, Native Guard. Her collection started off with the an elegy to her mother. Most of the poems in the beginning were about her relationship with her mother, and ultimately dealing with the grief of her passing. Then the last part of her collection was about the forgotten soldiers of the Native Guard. She explained to us the reason for her placing her mother and these soldiers in the same collection. She said that they had one thing in common. Each of them were left to be forgotten, and that the people that should have honored them left no memorial for them. She did not give her mother a tombstone, and the Blacks soldiers names were not left on a plague like the white soldiers names were. This made her collection connect and come together. This made me realized how important it is that your collection has some sort of theme to it. It gives depth and meaning to your poems. Reading other collections you also see how the poems all connect. Some poems feed off of the one before, almost like a story. So as you create and set up your portfolios think about what kind of story or message you want to tell.