The first draft I made of this was created for a post in which we were asked to take a foreign poem

and phonetically translate it into English. I thoroughly enjoyed the exercise and found it to be poetically inspiring. In this poem, I wanted to really let sound and language drive the poem. I took the first line from the translated poem and using a combination of words and phrases, formed a poem that was written purely based on sound. In my second revision, I created an environment of war and hostility, letting phonetically pleasing words from my original translation act as a force to push the poem forward. Phrases like ammo in arms and day loss cost us are all construed with words that together play on sound and make the poem sound pleasing to hear. Ammo in arms plays on the a and m sounds while day loss cost us plays on the o and u sounds. There were certain words and phrases besides these that I found intriguing and kept in all the revisions, words like vine, the duel enchanted, grim mass, and pawn. The original poem that I translated from was Yo Como Tu by Roque Dalton. The poems original content describes a person who is discussing love and traveling and has an overall cheerful tone as well as mood. Therefore, I found it ironic that when phonetically translating it the Spanish word for amor sounds like armor in English. Throughout the several different revisions, I tried to focus on exploring different word choices, and experimenting with the different sounds and images they created. In the fourth draft I created a strong consonance of the b sound by changing the line to breaks the bones of fallen men below. I wanted to create a poem with electrically charged language. I tried to stay away from stock images and focused on making sure the diction was fresh and different, creating a new perspective to the scene and situation (which is kind of ironic because a lot of the poem addresses death and decay). Something that I think that I have been having trouble with this semester is just letting go and stop feeling like I need to take control of a poem. It was extremely hard for me to not preplan a poem and construct in my head an overall goal of how I wanted the poem to look, sound, and even what it would mean. The problem with this was that I was already limiting myself and the poems future growth and potential. Rather than allowing the poem to go outside of it expected boundaries and allow the language to take control of the poems direction, I was setting boundaries and expectations on my poem that were either causing the poem to side track from the amazing direction that it could of eventually gone or prevented myself and my poem from reaching its full potential as an extraordinary and exceptional piece of poetry and art. In this way, this poem has helped me break from these chains a little bit and truly explore all that the world has to offer.