Thoughts on Exercise for 1/22/13

In my “second task” poem about Peggy Clevenger, I tried to frame the stories believed about her by the Pine Barrens by having the first stanza closely mirror the last stanza.  I repeated “once” and left in "It was said" and "It was known" to cause the events about Peggy to read as if her story was a fairy-tale.  By placing the Piney’s belief about her stocking of gold at the beginning of the poem and ending with the fact that it could not be found at her death, I sought to question whether the accounts about Peggy turning herself into a rabbit and a lizard could be believed either.  

            As I was writing my “second task” poem about the blueberry packing house, I divided the paragraph into two groups.  The first covered the events happening outside; the second focused on the activity inside.  In my poem, I began with the outside and inside setting, moved on to the people in both places, and finally focused on just Charlie and the old picker at the end.  As I was writing, I noticed halfway through that my stanzas were each six lines long and decided to keep that length until the last three lines.  By placing the last three lines by themselves, I sought to highlight the importance of the old man’s action.  The “Inside-Out” at the end is meant to contrast the action of returning the tickets against the action of the stores that knock off berries to get extra pints.