"Tender Buttons" Part 3

Reflection on my version of “Tender Buttons”

To be completely honest I struggled though out this assignment. I never completely grasped the concept of Stein’s poem which made it quite difficult to write my own. Once I wrote it I was proud of my original poem, I like the way it sounds and how I simply picked the first things I saw for each section. It made me look closer at everyday objects that on a normal day I take for granite.

The first experiment I did on my poem was option eleven, where I laid out my original poem into long structured sentences then took the first and last words of each line to see what would happen. I in some instances take more than one word, because I felt words like The, A and I were not suitable words. I had trouble making columns on my computer so I printed out the poem and cut and pasted it onto another piece of paper( I could not copy and paste it this way into the blog for some reason). After experiment eleven I liked the way it sounded and looked it was a very broken way of writing which forced me not to worry about adding little words here and there, but I wasn’t quite finished yet.

From there I added in experiment one. So I took my new 2-3 word sentences and wrote them backwards. When I wrote them backwards I dropped the words The, A and I that I had decided to keep during my first experiment. I felt it would look more cohesive if every line only had two words. I kept the same order of the poem but each line was written in reverse. Once I was finished with this step I started to like the poem once again, but only in parts. There are certain lines that I love, and other which I feel lost their original meaning completely.

In the end I am satisfied with my poem, when I started this project I thought it was going to be a disaster, but it the end I like the way it all turned out. I like each version of my poem for different reasons, which really surprised me. I had a feeling like I would be disappointed. Yet now that it is finished I have a better understand of how changing the way we write and speak can really open the mind up to different ways to look at everyday objects and I used a new part of my creativity and imagination to help me see the world a little differently.