Fiction Adaptation: Research into Poet

I have found some information about the poet Antosh Wojcik who wrote the poem I have chosen to adapt for this unit. Although there isn't much online about him, I have read his article 'My experiences of poetry' which allowed me to find out a little more about his career and works. He describes his view on poetry at a young age. 'A lot of the time, I had no idea what any of it meant and didn't want to care about the poet's plight, so I rejected it the moment I no longer had to study it'. I found this quite interesting as he describes poetry as something he never had a huge passion for and something he just fell into in later life through writing short stories. He expanded on his poetry during university by performing what he had written at open mic nights, of which he received great feedback. In terms of his other poems, including one entitled 'Poem 364', which feels quite personal, he reads them through first person starting his sentences with 'I'. This immediately makes him the character of the poem, something I can imagine to be quite engaging when he is performing. He uses this as a platform for telling his stories in a very personal and direct way.

In terms of the poem I am looking at - 'Building a Second Home as it Sinks into the Sea', I think the style is completely different to his previous works. There is no use of 'I' and he tells the story through characters. The poem itself is very complex with graphic imagery such as 'I have been picked clean by sky piranhas, they thought I was a basket of chips carrying a heart'. This line struck me in particular because it seems to be dehumanising the character which brings quite a lonely tone to it as if the character feels unimportant. I wasn't sure what his interpretation of the poem was but for me, I feel like at least one of the two characters in the poem is troubled by something, but it is not made clear exactly what. There are mentions of a mannequin, who is described as a naked man who is asked to leave the beach but he is not brought into the poem later on. Other lines hint to this idea but I think it could be interpreted in many different ways.