Bri Pantelis
Mrs. Collins
Senior project
5/6/2020
Bruce was originally meant to be one long prose poem. The original process for Bruce was a personally experimental one, albeit a forceful one. I had a mental
image of who Bruce looked like and modeled Bruce after him, until I realized Bruce had a life of his own and this guy wasn't Bruce. I then tried to get inside Bruce's head to see how
he felt about things, or certain songs to evoke the scene for the story. The original Bruce story was going to be a collection of vignettes. If I or Bruce wasn't feeling a scene, I
would erase it. I finally read the "final" draft of Bruce aloud to my parents and realized I didn't like the flow of it. so I erased some more. Then, I realized the story was still too long enough to post
on to my website, so I narrowed it down into a poem. The nature of Bruce is just a poetic description of a guy's quirks. The meaning of Bruce is that you only see a
superficial side to him, since you don't know him, you can judge for yourself what he's like. Based on my own experiences of people who don't really know me
assuming things about me. I'm not saying that it's right to judge Bruce, I'm only basing it off my real life experiences.
Beat generation writer is a comparison piece, contemplating the past and comparing it with the present. I centered the poem around the word Beat, and used it as a free association
piece from the word Beat, because I was obseesed with the Beat generation. From it I got BEATS, beets, ( inspired from my poem A supermarket in California, 2020), The Go
generation, The Go-go generation, Beat music and rap beats. The poem was taking something rare, a poet inspired by the beat generation, living in the modern world of BEATS,
mostly rap beats.
I wrote "The birth of cool' after tinking about the jazz and Beat generation scene of the '50s. How before the '50s, there wasn't a feeling of cool. The '50s was also the birth of
sophisticated cool, Lounge jazz, Frank Sinatra, dinner and cocktail parties. Jazz being played at fancy restaurants. I wanted to put it poetically how Cool was born. Where cool came
from, from the sultry vocal jazz of Billie Holiday, to the hipsters and poets of the '40s. Then I tried to think of how cool evolved to the '60s, or even how the definition of "Cool."
changed from an outsider's group to being into the latest thing. Even how far away we've gotten from the original definition of 'Hipster.' It is a social and historical commentary piece.
I wrote" Bitter as blood" using a random word generator. I put words that sounded interesting together to form a sentence. It is a purely experimental piece that has no meaning to it.
a Supermarket in California, 2020 was a response to Allen Ginsberg's 'A Supermarket in California.'
i liked how he was writing to Walt Whitman about people he saw in a grocery store. I wanted to take that same market and update it for the 2020s, If I were to go into a Supermarket
n California nowadays, I'd see health-crazed millenials, hipters and soccer moms.
So I wanted to ask both Walt whitman and Allen Ginsburg what they thought of them now, since they are both figures of the artistic past, the counterculture's reaction to mainstream
culture.
Left brain society was my attempt at turning a story I had written about artists taking over the government into a poem. I tried to condense the same feelings an ideas from the story to
fit them into a poem. Like Bruce, it is a fictional poem. More like a utopian future, and how the traditional non-artists would view an artistic society as "Unstable."
But I changed the tone of the poem from being political, to being more about Right brainers vs. Left brainers.
My experience at AAW was a lot like my writing style, constantly evolving. When I first came to AAW, I wanted to be a musician, I had no previous experience playing an instrument
so I took up guitar. I met a few people who liked the same music I did and were in bands. We would go to concerts to support each other, though I never formed a proper band myself.
But by Sophomore year, I realized I wanted to be a poet after being inspired by one of my poet friends. By Junior year, I had become tired of playing guitar and realized I didn't want to be a
musician anymore and that I wanted to be an actress. So I took acting. Acting was a fun class in which we recieved constructive criticism to help improve our skills. It was the first class
where I actually felt like I belonged to a group. Over the course of my 4 years at AAW, I've had classes where I didn't care for whatever we were learning, but the people in the class
made it entertaining. My favorite of these classes was Physical Science 2nd semester. Sometimes our teachers would get into some of the fun as well. I learned a lot about my learning
style at AAW, like how I preferred Chemistry to Biology or Physical Science because you could actually apply knowledge to it.
My first two years at AAW were the funnest. But Sophomore year was my favorite. In freshman year I had some drama with girls over boys and learned to be careful who you tell
your feelings to. Most of my closest friends came later throughout school. Starting in freshman year, I began hanging around upper-classmen because my friend had an older brother
who we'd hang out with. By Senior year, most of my friends had either switchMed schools or graduated. I had only one good friend left. Senior year was the least motivational year for me.
There were less people that year so it made the classes more boring and the events less fun. The best dance I ever went to was the Fall Ball freshman year. Everybody went to that dance.
At AAW, I met alot of people who shared the same interests I did, snd even expaded my interests.
Going to AAW hss helped broaden my horizons on educational things such as science, history, philosophy and of course, art. Meeting people at AAW has helped open my mind up about how art
is defined. While at AAW, I learned about certain art movements such as Dada and the French New Wave, as well as art techniques such as Prose poetry, absurdity, esoteric and obscure poetry. If
not for AAW, my taste in music would not have expanded, I no longer feel ashamed to like the music my parents like after meeting friends who like that type of music. I would've never taken the
time to dig deeper and self educate myself about the world of art. I would've never gone out of my comfort zone to make new friends and have a confidence about myself., I would've never found
myself as an artist. I have grown a deeper appreciation for all types of art, especcially experimental and Avant Garde. I would've never found the confidence and comfortability to talk to
boys.Thanks to AAW, I have learned the people skills to deal with people and be a good friend.