A notebook full of bad poetry I wrote in high school has turned up. I can’t believe what a geek I was, at first I was thinking ‘What the fuck?’ when I went through it, but then I remembered.
We had to write 20 poems and illustrate them. We had to do them in specific styles or on certain subjects…a sound poem, a poem about a color, a cinquain, two haikus, two limericks, etc. The poetry is very uneven, some of it doesn’t make me cringe but quite a bit is really bad. The part that had me shaking my head was the illustrations. They are extremely crude pen and colored pencil…sketches I guess you would call them. Most look like they were drawn by a slow 8 year old.
Now, I’m no great artist but I’m probably better than most people in certain media, basically everything but paints. I have books of scribblings from when I was 4 that were comparable to what I used in my notebook. I could have done better, even though I didn’t start the project until the night before it was due. I only did it because it was a weighted grade and I needed it to maintain a passing grade, and I remembered my young idealistic fury with Ms. Brown for forcing me to participate in what I considered an extremely stupid and tasteless project. Anyway, she required illustrations but said she wouldn’t grade them on their quality, just their presence, and that’s why I made such ugly illustrations. The notebook is two sheets of black posterboard, tied together with twine and wrapped around the 22 pages of white typing paper (20 poems, title page, table of contents). Has ‘POETRY’ written on it in black pen. I was so angsty it was disgusting.
Except some of them are somewhat interesting…I don’t have many examples of my art that wasn’t very precise and realistic because that was all I liked back when I had the energy for hobbies. Some of them remind me of the more austere old Japanese prints. It’s kinda neat.