Question

Write a Poetry Portfolio with two poems using different forms; they can be from your own point of view about something you feel strongly about, or they can be from the perspective of someone else

Answer 1

Poetry Portfolio

Artist statement (brief)
- Two poems in different forms. The first is a sonnet in my own voice about carrying absence inside a familiar space. The second is a pantoum written from the perspective of someone who carries two homes — memory and the new city — and repeats lines to mirror the looping work of remembering and remaking a life.

1) Inventory of an Empty Room
Form: Shakespearean sonnet (14 lines, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG)
The sweater folded, square as winter light,
I press my palms against the lock of air.
I count the small ghosts settled in the night
That keep the place where you were always there.
A coffee ring, a ticket stub, a pen,
The chair remembers how you leaned and sighed.
I run my fingers over things again
And find they hold the temperature you died.
I map the space between your laugh and breath
Measure the hours stacked upon the chair.
The catalog of ordinary death
Does not fit in a chest to clear or wear.
Yet morning comes, a loud and patient thing,
And stitches the small ragged edges of why we sing.

Reflection: The sonnet’s tight shape suited the inventory-like details I wanted to list while the concluding couplet offers a small, stubborn consolation — a way of admitting that routine, not explanation, is what stitches grief into living.

2) Two Maps
Form: Pantoum (repeating-line form to create echo and accumulation)
I hold two maps that lead me back to shore.
One folds small, with train times scrawled in ink.
The other is a house with no front door.
I keep them both against my ribs and think.

One folds small, with train times scrawled in ink.
It lists the days I traded names for pay.
I keep them both against my ribs and think.
I learned to curve my vowels like a bay.

It lists the days I traded names for pay,
A child's drawing taped above the sink.
I learned to curve my vowels like a bay.
My mother taught me how to keep from sinking.

A child's drawing taped above the sink,
The second map smells faintly of soy and smoke.
My mother taught me how to keep from sinking.
I practice folding grief into small folk-songs.

The second map smells faintly of soy and smoke.
The city gives me hours stamped in chrome.
I practice folding grief into small folk-songs.
I tell my son these streets will be his home.

The city gives me hours stamped in chrome.
I map the quick, uncertain paths we've roamed.
I tell my son these streets will be his home.
I hold two maps that lead me back to shore.
The other is a house with no front door.

Reflection: The pantoum’s repeating lines echo how memory returns and how the present unavoidably repeats elements of the past. Repetition becomes the form’s meaning: the maps recur, the lessons recur, and the attempt to fold grief and belonging into daily life repeats until they alter shape.