Author: Freddy Durbin

Brady [Writing Center tutor] helped me cement the ambiguity of this piece into concrete, sensory imagery. His interpretations and comments on the meaning of my poem helped me to understand where to keep ambiguity and where to aid the reader with more obvious, concrete images. In the original draft, the “eddying winds” were not specifically autumn winds, and the “fronds” were not specifically sere. I added these details to signify that the poem, fundamentally, is about the season of fall and the death that it presages. The added details aid in the atmosphere of the poem, and these suggestions helped me ground the reader with images and sensory experiences.

Brady [Writing Center tutor] and I discussed a lot of things regarding the second stanza of this piece. The poem naturally trails into a more philosophical realm during this stanza, and I received help in how to effectively convey what the point of the poem is. Sometimes this, as in prior pieces, included the bolstering of ambiguity that works but more often in the addition of concrete non-abstract imagery to ground the reader. What inspired me philosophically to write this poem is my belief in the interconnectedness of nature; that every living thing is kindred on some fundamental level.

I received such great feedback on how to keep the integrity of the syntax in the poem by letting go of some more florid phrases in the original draft. Since this poem is a terza rima, any editing and word changes at the end of a line can mean having to reverse engineer the poem to clean it up. The feedback as a whole never changed the narrative of the poem, but many words were changed. In the first stanza instead of “lanes,” I originally used “streets.” Changing this singular word meant altering the whole poem sonically (the rhymes and sounds would now have to be different), but the narrative functions the same as it would have stayed as “streets.”

Brady [Writing Center tutor] assisted me specifically with the line length and flow of this poem. I noted that near the end of the poem, the lines stretch out and were aesthetically unpleasing and did not aid in the function of the piece. Brady helped me tighten up verses, and mostly near the end of the poem, I was assisted in adding in some extra line breaks. The feedback that Brady gave me that was most helpful was advice on where to add line breaks. The poem was much less polished than it appears here; this is owed to line breaks in the somewhat free verse form of the piece.