My Portfolio is titled “Medium.” In it, I want to explore the boundaries of creative writing by stepping outside some of the traditional forms I’ve worked with and seen. The inspiration for the portfolio stems from one of my pieces, “Duplexity,” where I had the idea of writing a poem that can be read both forwards and backwards. While that poem was challenging to write and took many tries to get just right, I found great pleasure in fiddling with the words until they fit. What results is a poem simplistic in diction, yet complex in structure. From its palindromic legibility alone, I find myself able to embed some deeper messages on relationships, hidden thoughts, and societal conventions, essentially for free.
From there, I took on a greater challenge in “Your Knight,” where I created a reversible and concrete poem, which added even more interesting challenges. It’s fascinating to have heard multiple opinions from others on who or how many narrators there are; while I had these questions answered while writing the poem, I prefer to embrace the open-endedness that its structure sparks.
I strongly believe that poetry should not only be read, but also experienced in other sensory ways. That’s why the pair of “Ineffectual Me” and “Undeniably Me” were so important for me to include in this portfolio. I want to present works through which you can feel my voice—-the trembles, cracks, change of tone, rhythms, etc. are all so important to introspective pieces like these. It’s a rant, it’s a rap, it’s one medium for me to let my creative juices and pent-up emotions free. To write slam poetry, I really take a step away from the calculated, thought-intensive process that usually goes into my writing, and instead just try and capture my feelings on a page; the rhythm and rhymes escape my inner-conscience in a more abstract form, before I polish them.
On a similar note, “If you were a Rainstorm” is a poem I created for people to actually interact with their poetry in a concrete fashion. This is a poem where a narrator responds to your input. As someone who loves programming and working with computers, I found it necessary to combine those passions with my creative writing in some capacity, so this work is my first attempt at joining the two. Through interaction, one can have multiple poems to experience from the same work, which I also hope gives users the freedom to explore the various paths and endings.
As a pianist, my favorite composer to listen to and play has always been Chopin. He’s the only composer I’ve encountered who can truly, beyond any doubt, make a piano sing. Perhaps Liszt could make more complicated and harmonic pieces, perhaps Beethoven broke more barriers, and so on. But nobody gave the piano a voice like Chopin. So, I took the first Chopin piece I learned, his famous Nocturne in E-flat, and meticulously mapped lyrics to the notes, many of which I had imagined all those years ago while first learning the piece. Almost on its own, this piece lays out a sentimental and beautifully tragic narrative in my mind, so I tried my best to express that as well as I could through my lyrics. The reader is encouraged to listen along to the lyrics and try to match the words with the melody. Truthfully, writing "over" such a monstrously phenomenal and timeless piece felt wrong in a way, though through this work I feel that I have created my own personal layer on top of a piece of music that I already have deeply resonated with for so many years.
And so, “Medium” is an intermediary between experimental and conventional genres, an amalgamation of my passions, curiosities, and challenges for myself. While there is a prescribed order for the pieces to be experienced in layed out in the table of contents, I believe there should be no restrictions for my audience’s enjoyment of the pieces, so they can be accessed in any order. I can see myself expanding each piece into a much larger work or collection of works, so this small assembly could very well be the “stem cells” for my future creative endeavors. I hope you enjoy.