When writing this poem I had been playing around with this idea for a little while now but hadn’t had a chance to really flesh out what I wanted to say. I feel like I had a lot more to say so stripping it down to the bare bones was really hard for me. My technical first draft is sitting in my notes app which is more a rant than a first draft. So what I have written here is a more polished version where I pulled all the things I liked from my rant. Endings are very hard for me but I really liked the way I moved the ending around for my final draft of it. For the second draft I tried to see what was missing so that I could add to it. From the way our class discussions have been going I think maybe trying to find things to take out may have made it fit a bit more but I really like how the end result turned out. It was absolutely a challenge trying to know what I needed to zoom in and focus on but I think I got what I was trying to say across to the reader.

 I decorated my book to be more traditionally feminine which I think works very well for the context of my poem which is about the patience and, in some ways, quiet violence of the women I’ve known. Originally I wanted the cover to have a field of flowers on the front to be a serene picture. But I ended up doing an ivy boarder for the front cover and a pattern on the back which I wanted to make look like lace. The ivy at the front reminds me of the ivy a lot of younger people putb in their rooms as decoration. The lace on the back was supposed to be a callback to a bit older of a generation. There was also a bit of a generational theme in my poem and I wanted that to be looked at a bit more and I thought the two different images would be a good way to show that. If I had a bit more time or resources I may have got an actual piece of lace to put on the back of the book. I think using images to re-enforce themes in the poem is the way I would like to use them for my final artists book.