My Asian Literature Portfolio

I have mentioned multiple times that I was taking Asian Literature which was like a poetry writing workshop. We did free falls, clustering, and a lot of non-stop writing exercise (mentioned in On Poetry) that lives off our mind vomits. It was great! It was frustrating! Honestly, I feel like I grew a lot as a poet because of the class.

The first piece I wrote for the class is called "Bottled in a Stick". The writing process for this piece started when I picked her cigarette from the angel cards I made. Then we wrote clustering from it which was supposed to be about my mom but as I wrote words down it became my friend and everything continued to flow in that direction. After the clustering, we'd choose one cluster to start writing a free-fall from it. I basically just stated the whole memory with Yra in that paper. And now, this is the outcome. Bottled In A Stick is a piece focused on frustration on how one length of a cigarette seems to wash her worries away.

The second piece I made was my stone poem. The idea around the Stone Poem is that there's a box and we'd get a stone from it that would trigger a memory we'd write about. Honestly, when I first saw my stone, it was blank. I didn't get any memory from it. I had to strip away what it looked like to write about something. It looked old and worn yet refined and smooth. It was a rock so I wrote about The Rocks in Sydney. When I was writing my proposal for the poem –– we need to propose an introduction using metaphors and imagery –– I thought that I would get shut down.

The Rocks is about the time I went to the Rocks, underneath the Harbour bridge and Haru. Haru has been my muse for this semester. Almost all of the poems I wrote are for him, about him. Particularly, this piece is when I saw him again. It's mainly memories and fantasies mixed together.

For our finals period, we were to write a lyric sequence following a particular Asian poetry form. Like its purpose and syllabic form. For mine, I chose Choka which is a type of Japanese poem Waka. The main theme of a Choka is love. It follows the format of alternating five and seven syllables and two extra seven syllables as envoy. The lyrics sequence is composed of 5 poems with 15 to 20 lines.
The sequence I wrote follows the seasons to give it an extra something.

what have you written lately?