Senior Writing Portfolio Students
Millikin University

Ryan Hosler

biography

I have lived in the same town for my entire life. I know this hasn’t shaped me completely, but it has had an impact in my life. Living in the same city for so long has given me a one-dimensional view of the world, which I hope to change after college. That being said, I think Decatur was a decent place to grow up. Though the town itself can appear dirty and rundown, (aren’t most of them that way) I still got the experience of living in the city and the experience of seeing the rural agrarian way of life found outside of town. My parents are fairly normal for the most part. Divorced, like half of America, I spent my youth hopping between my father’s house on the weekends and my mother’s during the week. As for me personally, I enjoy videogames and poker like most guys. I can be extremely pleasant if I want to be, but have a quick temper especially if I think I am right.

Poetics

I do not pretend to know what poetry is or how to define it. I can only tell what I look for in my own work. Obviously, my poetics have evolved over the course of my college career. For me the most important quality in a poem is sound. Keep in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean flow as most would describe good poetry, but sound. The use of sharp “b” sounds juxtaposed against soft “ir” as in birch and then repeating that same sound somewhere else in the poem. Often the eye does not recognize this, but the ear certainly hears it.

I have been experimenting quite heavily with narrative strategies in my poetry. Though I don’t think one is greater than the other, (lyric vs. narrative) I think the narrative structure can sometimes make it much easier for a reader to understand the extended metaphor being presented. And just because you’re using narrative strategies doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a narrative poem. The example below is one where I’m using narrative strategies with a heavy emphasis on sound.

writing sample

Annotation

“Alington..” places heavy emphasis on craft and sound quality. The deployment of narrative strategies in the first two stanzas allowed me to focus on the meaning and word sounds rather than having a set structure or lack thereof. The third stanza departs from the first two and is sort of a list, which is typically found free verse lyric poetry. (Whitman)

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