Intention Statement:
I am exploring the feeling of being lost through the experience of photography. The narrator of the poem is a person who is exploring herself while looking at a series of photos of a young male. She talks about the different versions she sees in herself and how the photographs of the boy relate to her feeling of fading in out of different personalities or moods. She feels lost because not one of her personalities is dominate and she can’t figure out how to really feel or act. She uses this series of photographs to try and figure out why she considers herself to be “six unrecognizable versions” of one person. The subject of the poem is trying to find herself through the help of photography. The narrator feels confused and scared as she feels lost in herself. There isn’t one version of herself that she feels suits her the best or that she is most of the time. She fades between these different versions based on the situation she’s in and her environment. This photograph series helps her explain this because the boy is seen in six different photographs. It is the same boy but each photograph is slightly different and each photograph gives the illusion of fading. This relates to her feeling of fading between the different versions of herself and her personalities. To show this in the poem I tried not to use punctuation. I feel that this helped with the illusion of fading. I wanted all the lines to blend together with no clear stops aside from the stanza breaks to show related ideas. I also used lots of repetition. I repeated the words “unrecognizable version” and “in and out.” Repetition in the poem allowed for these two ideas, having different versions of one self and fading in and out, to be clear to the readers. For the line “who is he” I broke each word onto separate lines and spaced them apart to show the narrator thinking. She is thinking and pondering the photographs in front of her wondering why there are six versions. She feels that this helps relate to her issue of having different personalities and is wondering who the boy really is and how he feels. The spacing of the words shows that this specific line is her thoughts verses the rest of the poem describing how she feels. I used words in the poem that flow well together to show the girl is constantly pondering this with connected ideas.