For this goal, I took Writing Poetry (ENGL 317) with Mary Carroll-Hackett in the spring of 2016. I took this class during an evening section, so it was a two hour and forty-five minute long class that met on Monday evenings. The class is a workshop base class, so for the first have we have lecture and then we critique and discuss the group of classmates whose poems we reviewed for the week. One thing Mary’s (as she asked to be called) class did for me, other than improve my poetry, is gave me confidence. It “helped me find my voice,” as she put it during a meeting I had with her. The scariest part of the class for me was when I had to read my poems for workshops. It really shouldn’t have been scary at all, but it was for me. Whenever it was my turn to read, I’d curl up in my chair a bit and not look up at the class for the entire workshop. I’d start to kick my feet and bite my fingernails. One of the funniest things that happened in the last class was, right after I finished the workshop of my poem, Mary looked up at me and said, “It’s over now. Now stop moving your leg.” Everyone in class laughed, including me, because I never fully realized just how much my demeanor changed when it because my turn to speak and be critiqued, but Mary still allowed my to work through my nerves by moving, even though she found it a bit annoying because she could see it out of the corner of her eye. I also discovered that my love of math extends so far as to have three of the five poems I turned in about math and that there was nothing wrong with that.

Below is one of the poems I wrote during the class. This was not one of the poems that was brought to workshop, but rather one of the poems based on a prompt Mary gave us. The poem is called A Night on the Water and is an ekphrastic poem, which is a poem based on a work of art. The piece of art, a painting in this case, is Starry Night Over the Rhone by Vincent van Gogh.