My Poem is about nostalgia and certain feeling surrounding it. Old memories and the past scare me because they remind me of all the opportunities I have missed and the time I have wasted. Putting it into a poem was very nice as it helped me express myself as a [poet and improve my poetry skills as I hated poetry because in middle school we never really wrote poetry but tore it apart looking for vague meanings.
Poem
Nostalgic Past
What is that feeling when you go back home
I Feel way too uneasy for this
Like a place with old fond memories
What is that peculiar feeling
Or remember from the depths of your mind
I swore I saw that picture in preschool
Somewhere you feel like you lost forever
Where is everyone, I feel like I'm lost
The strange mood inside a department store
This place feels like it goes on forever
Or the droning of fans in the school
Eventually, you won’t hear the noise
Cloudy rain drapes like a sheet over the park
The rain is cold and bites tender skin
A golf course on a very hot summer day
The hotter it gets the farther it will seem
An old mall with almost nobody there
This place is too large to be this quiet
What is that feeling you feel
Is it a Euphoric feeling
Is it a sad feeling
Is it nostalgia
Or is it fear
Are you afraid of the past
Does it scare you when you remember
Of time that passed too fast
What is that feeling when you go back home
Would you go back if you would have known
Artist Statement
Elias Foutz
This poem is about the personal feelings I have about nostalgia. I get an uneasy feeling when I see something sentimentally familiar. This feeling is happiness mixed with a hint of sadness and scared feeling. It was really hard to describe originally so I put it into this poem to help me word it out for other people to catch the feeling. These feelings range through a lot of things, from seeing my old childhood home to remembering an old cartoon that has become nightmare fuel today, to the sounds and smells of summer on a golf course, and the warm evening of the high desert. I grew up in the 2010s and that certain aesthetic is almost creepy, and style moves so fast through the 2000s that things from my childhood are almost ancient. I originally thought about this concept when we read about personal experiences in poems. However, I wanted My poem to be different. The childhood feeling was used by other people so I added a section at the end of my poem that asks the reader what they feel. Personally, nostalgia is kind of scary for me as it reminds me of the days and moments I will never have again; for example, in line 24 I wrote, “Does it scare you when you remember - Of time that passed too fast.” Another purpose of this line is to communicate with the reader. Along with line 27 which says, “Would you go back if you would have known.” Which asks the reader the big question.
One huge aspect that went into creating this poem was liminal spaces. A liminal space is an area between your starting point and your destination. Like a hallway in a school or old intersection, although it also includes abandoned places and other things like indoor playgrounds or places with old aesthetics that are almost creepy. These pictures are usually taken with a camera that has a horrendous quality to push the old nostalgic feeling. The fear-inducing part is usually when the area is dimly lit and shadowy, making it nerve-racking. These images are usually of places you have never been to but seem familiar nonetheless. They stuck with me, and the more I looked at these images the more they inspired me to write about them. I was never into poetry. The main reason for this was my poor experience of it in middle school, where I learned to despise it. Now I see it differently, and these themes and concepts brought new light to poetry for me.
Reflection
As a poet, the perspective I have about poetry has grown drastically. In middle school, poetry units were a living hell or as a Billy Collins poem says,” But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.” So my 1st drafts were straight to the point about the feeling of these nostalgic spaces as seen in the 1st line of my 1st draft,”
“What is that uneasy feeling when you go back to somewhere you used to live
I Feel like I'm going to puke”
I then throughout my drafts shifted the poem to be more cryptic so the reader could make their interpretations and rewrote my opening line to this.
“What is that feeling when you go back home
I Feel way too uneasy for this”
I like the cryptic poems as they make the reader make up their own decisions, I usually am a straight-to-the-point person but I think that writing poems generally changed how I write.
The 3 most important changes I made were Enjambment, Improving the ending, and vagueness. In my poem I had 2 voices communicating and talking to each other and I made each italicized line 10 syllables only. My 1st draft was not very smooth because of the line length on each voice which kind of threw off the rhythm as seen here,”
Like when you walk through a department store
What is that Sharp pine smell
It never sounded right so I messed with the syllable count in each line and came up with a much better version of the line above,”
Like a place with old fond memories
What is that peculiar feeling
The change makes the poem a lot easier to read and flow smoothly which improves the overall reading experience.
My second change was improving the ending of my poem by adding a stanza talking about the feelings correlating with the poem. My 1st ending,” What is that uneasy feeling when you go back to somewhere you used to live” was only 1 line and threw the flow of the poem off completely. I reworked it multiple times and eventually came to this,
What is that feeling you feel
Is it a Euphoric feeling
Is it a sad feeling
Is it nostalgia
Or is it fear
Are you afraid of the past
Does it scare you when you remember
Of time that passed too fast
What is that feeling when you go back home
What is the feeling that continues to roam”
This version was a huge improvement from the 1st as it begins to question the reader about how they feel. It makes the readers question themselves about their memories.
In my poem vagueness was something I revised for in later drafts it makes the reader interpret their own visuals so some lines went from,”
Or when you go into a hobby lobby
What is that Sharp pine smell”
To more vague lines like,”
The strange mood inside a department store
This place feels like it goes on forever” Not everyone had the same experience inside of a Hobby Lobby as I did so making the description vague allows readers to make up their own experience. This gives the poem a better overall impact on my descriptive writing skills.