Sissy Rodriguez Portfolio Reflections

“Nothing is original, steal from anywhere that resonates with information or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, lights in the shadows. Fetch only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work and theft will be authentic. Authenticity is essential, originality is non-existent. Do not bother concealing your thievery; celebrate it if you feel, in any case, always remember what Jean Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.’”

This is a quote from Jim Jarmusch, a movie maker and producer in which he said in a speech in January 2004. I chose this quote because I feel embodies many of the themes that I have witnessed and experienced throughout English 150: authenticity, context through creative process, creativity and its imitations, inspirations, originality, postmodernism, sense of wonder, sources, and the overarching transformative process I myself have underground in English 150.

Hi my name is Sissy Rodriguez, and this is my final portfolio video project for English 150, Introduction to Literary Studies. As a political science and journalism major, my entire educational journey has been centered mainly around facts and arguments. I’ve never been one to dive into a good book in my free time, explore poems, or anything of that literary nature. In fact, English has always been something that I sort of resented, as my type-A personality would have it. Taking English 150 actually began as a gen-ed that I needed to fulfill, but it turned into something much more. Throughout this process, I’ve learned just as much about the creative process as I have about myself. For someone like me, who never enjoyed reading or writing that had anything to do with literature, this course pushed my boundaries and allowed me to explore new aspects of myself, all while learning so much more than I expected initially. The creative process is different for everyone, and comes in many forms. This is my story.

[2:21] Web page of “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou

In this video, I will be discussing the creative process in its entirety via two different projects that I worked on throughout this semester. First is a poetry essay focusing on the cultural, social, and historical analysis of Maya Angelou’s famous poem, “Still I Rise.” The second is a multi-dimensional e-poem video by Leah Ayliff entitled “Wanderlust.” First, I will begin discussing my process in writing my poetry essay based on Maya Angelou’s iconic poem, “Still I Rise.” Beginning the process, I knew that choosing this poem might be difficult since it’s such an iconic poem that evokes many feelings with the reader. On getting started, I knew I had my work cut out for me, as many people can relate to this poem in different ways, and Maya Angelou’s own experience is seen in her very own works. Writing this paper would be a challenge for me creatively, artistically, and just as a writer it was something new for me.

Dani Shapiro, whose new book is “Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life,” compared a writer beginning a book or literary essay to a swimmer moving towards the end of a diving board. You can’t look down and see that there’s water in the pool. You have to take this  leap and really not know. Risk really means risk. You have to think, “I may spend six years on this and it really won’t work out, but you really just have to do it anyway.” While this work didn’t take me six years, it did take me until the end of the semester to really get my process quite right. The creative process for me began initially just writing a rough draft. My first draft of “Still I Rise” was my very first project this semester, and as someone with a heavy background in argumentative writing, I wasn’t really sure where to begin. The creative process could cover many shapes and forms, but for me, it first began by just reading this poem and putting myself in Maya Angelou’s shoes. She had pulled a lot of her own stories and personal experiences into this poem, but she wrote this poem as a way in which she’s speaking at the reader, emphasizing much on “you,” the word “you” in the poem, directly at whoever is reading it. So, after receiving critiques from my professors, I took that into account for my revisional process stage. In this stage I used all that feedback, and it led me to see that a literary analysis of Angelou’s personal history in combination with the narrator’s tone and message would help to really deliver the different perspectives I was trying to highlight in my paper. I began digging deeper into the various influences that this poem had on all those who read it. It had been highlighted by many different presidents, many different social figures, singers, songwriters, artists. Everyone could take something away from this poem, so being able to just write a paper that was so compelling, it really became something that I needed to do since I had to do such a good poem justice. After my revisional process, I began to perfect my final product, and, overall, comparing my first draft to the final essay that I produced, the creative process can be seen quite clearly. I worked through my ideas, I worked through my thoughts, I weeded out things that I thought would be good in the beginning, I made lots of errors, I was able to pull something really great together in the end, and I think this paper just highlights what the creative is truly about in literary arts.

[6:02] An image of two sets of boxing gloves appear with the caption “Poetry Essay vs. E-Poem.” Another image shows a quote from Dorothy Parker, “Creativity is a wild mind & a disciplined eye.”

Overall, my creative process in writing my poetry essay was to emphasize the feelings that Maya Angelou was trying to get across in her poem, “Still I Rise,” this idea of femininity and power and strength and overcoming all of these obstacles and still being this strong, powerful person. My creative process stemmed from that, and I worked very hard to give the poem justice and make it clear to the reader how important and how compelling this poem could be to everyone, including Maya Angelou. In contrast, my e-poem’s creative process took a very different form, just considering that the paper has a very linear format: beginning, intro, middle, end type of thing, where it’s like a written paper, whereas my e-poem was going to take on all these different formats; I’m going to be using videos, I’m going to be using songs, I’m going to be using pictures, and all these different elements to get that same overall feeling across to my reader. Well, the feeling was different but I was trying to get a message sent to my reader, something that they would understand through watching my e-poem. So, my creative process in both of these projects was to relay something to the viewer, the viewer, but their forms took on many different ways.

Kris Marsh, a professor from Harvard University, recently spoke about her own personal creative process, in which she said:

[7:29] The written quote from Marsh appears on screen

“My creative process is to write, and write some more when a new idea comes to mind. The first thing I do is write all that I know, want to know and do not know about the topic. Sometimes this process can yield well over 20 pages. I then step away from the document and bounce my ideas off of both academics and non-academics. After talking and gaining multiple points of view, I am ready to revisit the “brain dump” document – as one grad student of mine calls the process. I revise the document and then turn to the literature to fill in the gaps and provide the theoretical framework for the literature.

I find that my best work is produced when I am excited about a topic. Therefore, I am very reluctant to take on projects that do NOT move me because it would be a disservice to the project and the potential collaborators as well as myself.”

I on a personal level really relate to what Marsh is saying about her creative process, because I too felt the same way: that my best work creatively was only going to come across if I was really excited and into my topic. Beginning with the poem “Still I Rise,” when I initially was assigned the poetry essay I knew I wanted to find a poem