Journal Entry #1

September 16, 2007

Dear Dwayne,

As dangerous as this sounds, I met Donnie Darkhorse (Edward Homick) on Myspace. I had subscribed to the poetry blog of one of Donnie's friends, and he saw that I was intrested in poetry and added me as his Myspace friend. Since then, we've talked a bit through the website, and I've read some of his poetry which I'm very fond of.

Donnie is a 20-year-old college student in Connecticut majoring in English. He's incredibly ambitious and is becoming more recognized each day. His first book of poetry, A Scar Is Born, was released over the summer of 2007. I've obtained a signed copy from Dinnie himself though I have yet to read it. I've read bits and pieces, however, and have found a few grammatical errors. I'm taking note of them as I read through the book.

Donnie loves to use alliteration and he's increidibly skilled at using this technique, but sometimes I think he goes too far. You can only use the same tricks so many times in so many poems before the reader gets sick of it and the poems become weighted down.

By reading Donnie's poetry, I hope to gain ideas of different tricks to use in to my own poetry (such as alliteration, metaphor, simile, etc.) as well as taking note of what I don't like about his style.

In "Enemies and Allies," some of the alliteration is so...obvious. It's like Donnie sat there thinking of words that start with the same letter just so he could use more alliteration. I think it sounds better when two words are used instead of three. It also sounds more natural. Example: "satanic souls", as opposed to "terrible tortured trend" sounds better to me. The poem could do without the "terrible."

I love how Donnie doesn't keep a uniform syllable count; each stanza is different, but the rhyme scheme is the same throughout. The thing is, he could completely disregard the end rhyme and the poem would still flow beautifully. With my poetry, you subconsciencely think, "She rhymed this with that and that with this." But with most of Donnie's poetry, you don't notice if he rhymes or not, which I like. It just flows.

Thus far, I've read three of Donnie's poems, and each are amazing. He is truly an inspiration. The last line of the last stanza of "Not I" is simply "Not I" which breaks the rhyme scheme as well as the number of lines per stanza. That's one of my favorite tricks: doing something slightly or completely different at the end of the poem to catch the reader off-guard.

Seeing as it's 11:35 pm, I should be geting to sleep. Goodnight, Dwayne.

Time spent reading and writing: 1 hour (I haven't been keeping track of time before now because I didn't want it to seem like I was writing an introduction to my journal just to take up time.)