Project One - Process

    My poem represents my reflection on my personal life and the experiences that led me to where I am now. The first line (“where did you go?”) was sampled from a song I was listening to while I was drafting my poem. I find that there are actions and people in my past that I no longer recognize because of how much my outlook on life has changed. In this particular instance, “where did you go?” refers to a past relationship. I reflected on what went wrong and how I feel moving on with my life. The next line (“my river runs to two mouths”) refers to my conflicted feelings between my past relationship and my current relationships, my past still clinging to me as I attempt to move forward. I chose the metaphor of a river because the point at which a river meets the ocean is called the mouth. The mouths also represent my past and current relationships, creating a double meaning that remains consistent with preconceived terminology. The third and final line (“love was never supposed to die”) represents my new and altered feelings about love. Whereas I once felt confident I knew what love meant, I am now unsure amidst my current conflict and feel my past understanding of the concept has “died.”

    I decided to choose the typewriter text effect because it felt the most “present,” as if I were writing or speaking the lines as the film unfolded. The quick flashes of images in short succession are images I took throughout the past three years of my life. They fly by so quickly that they are unintelligible from each other, representing the blurred lines of my past. This moves in direct contrast with the longer videos, which were all taken at Stanford to represent my current self. The scattered letters, different sizes of text, and repetition of words all work to convey a sort of disillusionment and abstraction of once clear concepts.