Project by: Aidhan Farley Astrachan (11th Grade)
Project Advisor: Jane Belton
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Michele Blackwell

Description of the Project:

Final Product (e.g., documents, images, video, audio, poster, display, etc.):

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Final Reflection on Learning: This is a project on creating a poetry portfolio to send to colleges. I plan to study poetry in college, and if I am supposed to send in poems, these will be the ones I send in.

This is a book of poems, yet it feels more like a journal. There are a total of 26 poems, the first one written in the summer of 2018, up to the last one written in the spring of 2020. As a child, I never had an interest in reading or writing. I was a very slow reader, which made lots of books boring for me. My writing did not make sense most of the time, and I could never fully express on paper the ideas that I had in my head. But that summer of 2018, something changed. I started writing things down, mostly bullet points and notes. The notes were random, things that just popped into my head at the moment. I would then go back to those notes, and expand them. They would eventually turn into poems, and I found a passion that way. I felt that through poetry, it was a lot easier for me to express what I had in my head. I didn’t have the structure of TEEAC, or a thesis, and some topic sentences. I could write in whatever format and about whatever I wanted. My mom then started giving me prompts and I would respond to them in a poem.

The first 5 poems of this collection come from those prompts. At first, I was skeptical about whether to include these in the book because I felt they weren’t at the level of some of my later poems. I then realized that showing how my poetry writing has improved is exactly the point of the book, and not adding them would defeat its purpose. The next 8 poems, starting with “Famous,” and ending with “Questioning,” are a culmination of an honors project I did in 10th grade with my English teacher, Calvin Walds. I had done a History project in Ann Carroll’s class on the life of Joe Louis, the famous boxer from the ’30s to ’50s. I wanted to continue learning about him, but I also wanted to write more poetry, so I combined the two. Each of these poems has a portion about Joe, whether it is about his life, connecting my experiences with his, or writing in his perspective. The next 13 poems come from Jane Belton’s Poetry class in the fall of 2019, starting with “1st Grade Autobiography,” and ending with “I’m FiNe.”

Through these poems, I truly found my voice, and these helped me cope with certain things going on in my life. Writing these poems was therapeutic for me, and I am so appreciative of Jane for pushing me to go deeper into my writing. The final two poems were written in the spring of 2020. The poem titled, “Write a Poem Using The Words Moonlight, Whisper, and Tomorrow” was a response to a prompt for a poetry competition. As this book is being published, I should hopefully find out if I won. As I sifted through all of these poems throughout the trimester, I realized that my writing does not always convey the “fun and happy” feelings that I have in my life. If someone were to only read my poems and not know me as a person, they might think I am depressed or sad most of the time. That is in fact not true, it is just that writing a poem usually calms me down and clears my mind. These poems also act as photographs for me, as for when I reread them, they immediately take me back to that specific time I wrote them. Even though my journey through high school is not done yet, I hope you enjoy these poems and get a glimpse of what my experiences have been like for the past three years. 

Thank you.

Aidhan Farley Astrachan