Reflection
My project for this assignment is inspired by the book ‘East’ by Edith Pattou. I decided to keep the original name for my project. East was my favorite book as a child, and my first ever longest read. The book was a gift from my sister. It stayed in the bookshelf for a while until on a certain afternoon, I read the first page and couldn’t put the book back down.
East is the story of a girl named Rose. Rose is born into a family shaped by her mother’s superstitions, which hold that a child’s personality is determined by the direction they are born facing. Rose is born on a day with bad weather, so the father can’t tell which direction is the sun. Her mother wanted Rose to be an ‘East-born’, like the daughter she had lost, Esther. Her true birth is North but her mother chooses to keep it a secret and called her Ebba for East instead of Nyamh for North.
Unlike her mother’s hopes, Rose grows up adventurous and restless, showing the very spirit of a North-born explorer. As a teenager, she encounters a mysterious white bear with whom she feels an unusual bond. The bear offers her family wealth in exchange for her companionship, but her father initially refuses, setting the stage for Rose’s extraordinary journey.
East is part of a sequel that adapts the Norwegian folklore East of the Sun, West of the Moon’. In my project, I remixed the tale with works of different poets to make a series of poems that follow the same story line and the same narrative style that shifts between the perspectives of different characters.
While looking for an idea to work on, I felt stuck among the pool of options I had. I knew I had to choose something I understood very well and so could easily make it my own. As I sat in the living room, I noticed an interesting corner I had not given much attention to, a book shelf. I rose and went to sit there with my notebook. Five minutes later I had forgotten about the assignment and instead surfed through the books. I pulled out a big black book, and sneezed, ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s poems’. As I sat there, memories of reading East came back, and I quickly jotted it down in my notebook.
I remixed the tale of East with different poems like Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 92, and even the nursery rhyme The North Wind Doth Blow. I chose to do a poem, because I wanted to use poetic instructions to highlight the character’s personality while opening the story to a broader interpretation. One of the things I like about poems is that they can not have the same meaning for different people, nor can they be read the same way every single time. Few people can relate to the story of a stubborn young girl who follows a bear, but with the poem, one might recognize destiny, the journey in pursuit of one’s purpose, or one’s love or one’s dream.
When collecting the sources, I seeked verses fit for specific lines in my poems. I used much of Poe’s ‘Alone’ for the second poem by Rose, because of its depth in portraying loneliness and I used Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 92’ for love and loss.
This work borrows from existing poems and tales, and is therefore plagiarism. Still, the final result feels authentic because I re-imagined, remixed, and combined ideas into something new. In the end, I am proud of this piece. I love that I was able to transform one of the classic tales.