December 22, 2003
Dear Ms. Kopriva,
In terms of thematic content, I would have to say that the most influential book I read in the entirety of high school was Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. As you are probably well aware, the play hammers out the message that life is cyclical—“in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.” In the fundamental aspects of human existence, but also in the little everyday things we take for granted. Sophomore year I was fascinated with this message and with the similar motif found in the works of Walt Whitman, which we read (specifically, Leaves of Grass) following Wilder’s play. Lines like “I swear now I see that everything has an eternal soul!/…I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!/That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it,/And all the preparation is for it…and identity is for it…and life and death are for it” resounded in me more than any other writer I had encountered.
Thus it is that, senior year, I have chosen a Whitman quote to title my portfolio: “Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling.” I consider dear Walt one of my biggest influences in writing and thinking over the past two and a half years, therefore his words seem a highly appropriate choice for the name of my magnum opus of creative writing. Plus, this particular selection relates to Whitman’s ever-present theme of naturally occurring cycles—a theme, as I said above, that has struck a chord with me for some time now. In my writing, one of my most important objectives is to come full circle at the end of a piece; to make sure there are no loose ends, to leave no confusion, and, if possible, tie in a detail or motif from the introduction. And just as Wilder believes in the power of human progress, moving the cycle of time forward in repeated acts, I do not think that because a piece comes full circle it is therefore stagnant—I attempt to ensure that while an inclusive end is reached, the piece has resulted in a new meaning, a more illuminating conclusion that leaves the reader with something different than what they started with.
Writing itself is inherently cyclical, giving Whitman’s quote regarding the sun even more relevancy. The barren cold of a pre-dawn morning is like the sluggish, unimaginative state of a newly-woken mind, and the incipient yellow-white glow on the horizon as the sun begins to rise is like the initial thoughts when the mind starts warming up and creating. When the actual sun finally pierces the sky, it is when the writer has struck a thought they can use for their piece, something tangible and centered and enlarging as time progresses. As daybreak continues, the sun sheds light on new land, melts snow and forms dew and draws diurnal creatures from their hiding places. The writer, in turn, condenses ideas and draws old ones from their resting spots; as their idea ascends into the sky, breaking through clouds and thawing a frozen psyche, it takes a definite path and moves toward a distinct objective. Whitman said, “Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling.” The time taken to reach that level of brilliance is the writing process—the drafting, the dead-ends, the reformations. Here, in the actual process, is the only time that writing does not seem to parallel the course of the sun—a piece may diverge from its initial focus and follow a new direction, but the grand star will never digress from its great arc. However, a piece of writing will, in the end, also resemble this semicircle, just only from a distance—as Ralph Waldo Emerson (another one of my favored sophomore-year writers) said, “Of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.”
It is this average tendency, the piece of writing’s focus, that comes together finally at high noon. At 12:00 the sun is almost too garish and bright to look at. It has peaked, and illuminates so much that the eye strains to take it all in; as indicated by the shadows located directly below the observer, it has concentrated on a very specific focus. Similarly, the writing has reached its apex—it has found a focal point and is almost overwritten, describing too many things at once and overexcited as to how much it can cover. Now comes the time for the gradual, calm descent into a sense of finality—the blazing heat of mid-afternoon, as drafting becomes tedious and the writer lazy; the beautification of the sky with the metamorphosis of great white clouds into wispy washes of complementary color, as the main ideas of the piece are filtered into one central theme and several illuminating background points; and the final setting of the sun, slipping below the horizon in blazing glory, as the piece comes to its ultimate draft. Ultimate is relative, however—just as the sun will rise again and repeat the cycle the next day, so can the “final” draft of a piece be brought back as the first draft of something entirely new. I quote you, Ms. Kopriva—“a piece is never finished.”
My first portfolio piece[1], “drug nation,” is an example of a piece that took a rather dramatic style change right in the beginning—still achieving the same ends as before, but as Emerson put it, a definite “zigzag tack.” It went from serious prose to whimsical poetry, a take on Dr. Seuss’s style of sarcasm hidden in children’s verse. The second piece, “Cold Healing, Warm Resignation,” followed a pretty standard path—it began as a class assignment and then just grew, section by section. The third piece, “Quetico Night,” is a sonnet. While it had the least number of drafts, it still followed the writing cycle, although it reached the supposed conclusion—the sunset—earlier than any other piece. “Rush,” the fourth piece, was one of the most arduous pieces, as I worked on it from August to December and incorporated more detail than I ever anticipated. As part of the sun’s path, it would make for a long day, with much cloud cover to overcome, but in the end result to a very satisfactory evening glow. The last piece, “The Wound,” is the piece that represents more than just 24 hours. Created for writer’s workshop sophomore year, it was written and drafted eleven times before being submitted for my portfolio of 2002. Then, this fall, it was brought back out and the theoretical final draft—“a piece is never finished,” I heard—became the first draft in another series of rewordings and new endings. It is my favorite piece, the one whose work on I am most proud, and the piece that reminds me that there is no infinite darkness when the sun slips below the tree line—it will rise again tomorrow.
If anything can be ascertained from the above paragraphs, it is that writing, to me, is a great rotation, and that transcendentalism had an incredible impact on my literary work from sophomore year on. Between Walt Whitman, Thornton Wilder, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the secret to successful writing is almost apparent. Almost. The process is not explained; that I figure out for myself, and that is chronicled in the following collection of my work. The beauty of the end result, however, is very much vocalized by Whitman when he describes the simple earthly cycle we see every day: the sun. “Give me the splendid silent sun,” he said, “with all his beams full-dazzling.”
That sun is what I hope to have accomplished.
Enjoy what follows, and thank you for an incredible semester. It was everything I expected and more.
Return to Portfolio Requirements page
[1] only a brief description of each piece appears here—there is forward explaining them in greater detail before each of their final portfolio drafts