Blog #2: Where I'm From (My poem, followed by analysis)

I am from sunshine. 
From the train tracks in Phoenix and Pearl Harbor Elementary School in Honolulu.
I am from the suburbs of Denver, a red brick bungalow, surrounded by red brick bungalows.
Swing sets and vegetable gardens and an overgrown blackberry bush with thorns.

I am from the plumeria tree, my sister and me, sitting in the branches with needle and thread, making leis, playing journey to the center of the earth under our house with stilts.

From learning to live in snow and hang on to two mittens for an entire winter.
The sun is shining, but it is so very cold!

I am from daydreams and stacks of books.
     Nancy Drew.
     Mara, Daughter of the Nile.
     From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
     Biographies of kings and queens and princesses, long gone.

I am from Jim and Mary.
I'm from the do-everythings,
     and then do some more.
From stop reading and drawing pictures.
Clean your room and do your homework.
      From church every Sunday, kicking my feet under the wooden pew during long prayers. 

I'm from Edward Severance Avison and stories of the emperor in Korea,
from Lena B. Hill and memories of Kansas.
Kimchee and fried apples with sausage gravy. Not at the same time.
From the legend of an ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence.
From the sound of my father practicing the trombone.

In our basement, my dad kept stacks of records.
Chopin. Tchaikovsky. Mozart.
Hula music and Irish jigs.
Up, up with people. You meet 'em wherever you go.
Disney story book records, the kind that tell you when to turn the page.
No rock. No opera. No country.

And when no one was looking, I danced.

Analysis of My Process: 
I've assigned this poem more than once to my students in RWS 305W, but I've never written my own. This semester I decided that I needed the experience, so I can talk about how to use a mentor text.

A mentor text is a guide to help you write something you are unfamiliar with. I am not a poet, and so any time I have written poetry, I follow some kind of pattern. (I do this with many kinds of professional writing as well, and I hope this is a useful writing strategy you take away from this class.)

To begin, I annotated the text. What is Lyon doing in each stanza? What kinds of descriptions is she using? What kinds of details is she providing?

Next, I began to brainstorm.
What do I remember? What details can I show? What do I want to show?

TV was a huge influence in my life, but I didn't include any of that. It just didn't seem to fit once I decided to start with sunshine and all the moves we made. I also left out our two years in Moses Lake, Washington.

No, sunshine, moving, books, music, cultural influences, all made the poem, and TV did not. I had other things I could have shared. For example, I sang in about six choirs between the ages of 6 and 11. I took piano, violin, and ukelele lesson and learn Irish dancing and the hula. So many things, but I needed a theme and so none of those made their way in.

Overall, I'm happy with my poem and the story of myself. I think it crafts an identity consistent with who I am and the factors that shaped me over the years. Btw, there is a home video link of me with my sister, brothers, and cousins in front of my grandmother's house in Phoenix. I think it works. Creating this poem helped me see myself in a unique way.

For this blog, do the following, and remember, you don't have to be perfect. You are experimenting and learning:

1. Study the mentor text (George Ella Lyon's poem). Annotate. Analyze. Mark it up so that you determine what each part is doing.
2. Brainstorm. Consider your own life, experiences, background, the factors that shaped who you are today. Create categories. See if you can find a theme that collects them. (Sunshine and daydreaming were my themes, and you can see that they determined which details I added.0
3. Start writing. Add details. Show, don't just tell. Don't be afraid to adapt the mentor text to make it work for you. You'll notice that my poem is longer than Lyon's. My identity is wordy. That probably does not surprise you.
4. Read it over again to see if you need more, or if there is anything you can take out. For example, I mentioned stacks of books, but I didn't say what KINDS of books. Adding that helps you know a lot about me. I had to adapt from the mentor text to do this, but that was okay. (It created an extra stanza.)
5. Make sure you add an image or two. Blogs are generally more than just text. 
6. Add a few paragraphs of analysis, as I did. Describe how you approached this? What parts of the poem did you follow? What parts did you change? What do you see as your theme? What details did you think about including but ultimately leave out? How do you feel about the final product?