the evolution of a poet: an explanation
I came up with this one night a very long time ago now, and I thought it was a really, really cool idea....well, this is the evolution of a poet based on geologic history. Each eon, era, or period is represented by a somewhat analogous time in my writing life. I'm keeping it, because I'm just enough of a dork that I still think it's kind of cool... and I put a whole helluva lot of work into it way back when, so why not.
PRECAMBRIAN
hadean eon (the solar system forms) -- learned to read, approximately starting at age three.
archaean eon (first formation of rocks on earth, beginning of oxygen atmosphere) -- wrote stories with my spelling words, the most notable ones being in second grade, about green alien cardinals ('spardinals') and bear-rabbit critters called 'rabbears.'
proterozoic eon (oxygen atmosphere, first sexually-reproducing organisms, first marine invertibrates): -- my fourth grade teacher had us do weekly compositions, kind of personal essays, i guess, and she bound them into books for us.
PHANEROZOIC
paleozoic era - 1996-August '00 -- This section spans a kind of ridiculously huge amount of time developmentally. What you've got here starts out when I was thirteen years old, in about the seventh grade (early cambrian period). Much of the kid poetry is in the moralistic, I-can-fix-the-world-with-a-poem kid style. I suspect there are random things that have been lost from this period of time, but I also think it's pretty cool that I've saved anything since for a decade. Moving into high school (cambrian period), I took a creative writing class my freshman year. I started to play with syntax and structure in some places. I also had more specifically focused subjects, instead of just the world at large. Around the summer of '98 (silurian period), I started my first pseudo-love poetry, an unfortunate shift which carried through several years and significant and not-so-significant others. I took a poetry class the summer of '99 (devonian period), so I had a handful of focused assignments to work on. My junior year of high school (carboniferous period) starts the terribly depressing poetry. At this point, I was completely thrown into my writing. There's spontaneously-generated driveway poetry, poetry based on my instant messenger screennames (because as a teenager I had several), poetry about my girlfriend, and I tried my hand at writing songs, when I was pretending I could play guitar. This section was originally broken up into sub-categories based on distinctions that no longer make overmuch sense. So, for simplicity's sake, they're out. (early and late permian)
mesozoic September '00-June '02 -- This is that weird middle era that only exists because there is some distinction between new(er) and old. This section contains my senior year of high school (triassic period). I wrote a LOT my senior year of high school. I was also editor of the literary magazine. Coincidence? I think not. This section was originally divided by subtle differences I no longer really see. I suppose that makes it easier to fill in with stuff that had, at one point, been considered "new" poetry. Anywho, it includes poetry from my creative writing 2 class (this was the.. erm.. eighth class I'd taken solely dedictated to writing), among other things. I'd really like to be able to chuck this back into "old poetry" with the rest of high school, and have even left myself built-in space to do so, but then the "new" section would be practically EMPTY because I've barely written anything since college. Clearly this means I just need to write a lot more. Then comes my first year of college (jurassic epoch)... and what an interesting time that was. I went to a lot of poetry open mic things and dealt with a lot of crap going on in my head and life (late jurassic, cretaceous, late cretaceous)
cenozoic era (this is now. i'm gonna
have trouble if i want to make more sections....*g*) - September '02-??
-- Okay, so I've moved everything from high school back, finally.
We're starting off this section with stuff from my poetry class my sophomore
year (eocene epoch). There are a few more
poems I need to find and post from more recent times, but I haven't really
been writing all that much, unfortunately. I'd really like to bump all
this stuff back to the weird middle section, but having the "new"
section blank, while in evolutionary terms seems way less arrogant, still
makes me sad. (oligocene)