It's Not as Good as It Should Be

Abstract

"It's Not as Good as It Should Be" is a collection of surrealist poetry that reflects my double major in graphic design and creative writing.

The collection comprises three types of poem: The first is formal poetry, written with intention. "Notes app poems" are erasure poems, made from the words and phrases I've collected in my phone's Notes app over six-month periods of time, from which I have erased parts to arrive at a poem. The "Wolf of Wall Street poems" are blackout poems; each is made by using a Sharpie marker to redact extensive portions of a page from "The Wolf of Wall Street" (a memoir by the stockbroker Jordan Belfort).

As a poet, I don't really care what message or meaning a reader appreciates in my writing. In design, this kind of thinking is very unusual; the focus is on delivering a specific idea or understanding to the viewer. One of my design goals was to represent a lack of agency— how to visualize and present my poems in a way that leaves them open to the interpretation of the reader.

To relinquish some of my agency, I repeated the collection in five books, each with its own imagery and organization. The reader gets to decide how they want to read the collection rather than me deciding for them. Book One is organized by date; Book Two is organized intuitively; Book Three is organized in sections by type of poem; Book Four is organized by chance; and Book Five is organized by the locations where the poems were written.