Brianna Birkel
A fresh start
"Who knew college was going to be so freakin' complicated?"
Academic Work
My academics this year involved a lot of intro classes, but mostly they involved figuring out how exactly to be a college student and prioritize my life.
Here are some selected poems I wrote for my favorite freshman year class, The Triggering Town taught by Frances McCue:
Letter to Paul from Rain City
Dear Paul,
Where I am from, people walk barefoot everywhere. Vines clamber up walls of brick buildings and the air is saturated with rain and smoke. Some days, a bare fog hangs so low you can’t see your feet. People here pretend to be tough, but they are good and deep and new. It is green in the winter and the children are wise beyond their years.
When I think of Columbus, I remember small-town anger and green bean casserole and burnt orange shag carpet. I remember late night woodshop conversations and the way the grease from grandma’s (if you could call her that) fried chicken hung in the air and fireworks at the end of the driveway. I remember two rifles, hung neatly over the bed, the souvenir of a different generation. I remember a disappearing childhood, memories stretching out over miles of corn fields in the rearview mirror. Everything my imagination-you embodies was stolen from me, left in those fields, smoke dragged through my ears – I don’t miss it. Thank God for that.
When grandpa passed, I cried – not for me or him, but for you. I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral, but funerals are for the living and I don’t owe them anything. I wish I did.
All the best,
Brianna
P.S. I wrote this letter on a napkin, God forbid I be a cliché. Napkins do bring out the honesty in me, I think. Not that you would know. It’s not like anyone ever tells the truth in letters, anyway.
A Vague Tribute to Lynn & Bill Shakespeare
People in this town walk fast and think slow.
Little girls in pink polka dots run through
the streets with the world in their hands, too young
to know it cannot ever be for them.
Graying landlords paint the doors bright colors
in hopes of fooling the generation
of aluminum cars and plastic toys.
Kids pretend to miss things they never knew,
champions of the eminent rebirth
of cassette tapes & film photography.
They say lightning never strikes twice, but I
come from a town where angry teenagers
leave home like clockwork, say if they make it
they’ll stay away from this artificial
life. If they don’t, they go away
to college to pretend to fall in love
& then drink themselves to death while waiting
for someone to tell them how they should live.
People from here preface everything with
not to say that they aren’t good people, but
I grew up on the same tales of little
white picket porches & expectations
& I know that it’s not about the war,
it’s about the courage with which you fight.
Reflections on Poetry
My process for writing poems is as follows:
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Get assigned to write a poem.
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Be low-level anxious about writing that poem for about a week, or from the time of assignment to about 24 hours before the due date.
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About 24 hours prior to due date, find some place completely new to sit and write (this has thus far included coffee shops, libraries, parks, a Mariners game and a pizza place).
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Drink a lot of coffee.
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Write down every single thing that comes to mind, even if it seems silly or poorly worded. Don’t worry about making ideas be related or connected in any way.
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If step 5 is inaccessible, write about a recent experience that’s stuck with you. Use the insights you have on this experience to write a poem.
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If step 6 still too difficult, start by writing about the things you see around you. See where it leads.
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If there seems to be a common theme or idea running through your ideas, great. Put those ideas in whatever order seems to make the most sense.
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If the ideas don’t seem to fit together well, print out all of the lines individually. Cut them apart, sort into favorite, okay and not great lines, then move them around (using the favorite lines as a skeleton and the others as connections) until it feels like a poem. Keep a few blank strips on hand to write in new lines as needed.
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Erase anything that doesn’t fit, doesn’t feel right or is unnecessary.
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Once it is good enough, give the poem to your mom and August Franzen. Talk out all problems and do initial revision.
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Turn in the poem and then leave it alone for at least three days.
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On editing: re-read the poem, erasing all things you still don’t like but were too invested in to get rid of the first time around. If necessary, repeat steps 5-9 until the poem is the best that it can be.
While I could talk all day about the intricacies of each poem I’ve written for this class, the single most intriguing thing that I found throughout this process was that I am not nearly as concerned with strictly adhering to the truth as I expected to be. In fact, I’ve found that I am happier and more satisfied with my poems when I lay down all of my preconceptions of what I “should” say, and just write for the sake of good writing. Truly, I do subscribe to Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town philosophy: “When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music…if you feel truth must conform to music, those of us who find life bewildering and who don't know what things mean, but love the sounds of words enough to fight through draft after draft of a poem, can go on writing – try to stop us."
#BlackLivesMatter Rally
My introduction to activism at UW was in Fall 2014, in protest of Mike Brown being murdered in Ferguson. This would kick off a long journey of activism for me at UW.
Making Friends
Here are some of the wonderful friends that I was lucky to make my freshman year!
Dinner with friends from the Haggett honors floor!
Lab tour with Professor Alejandro Garcia, who taught our honors introductory physics series
First year (of many!) with Unleashed! A Cappella
Some friends from University Singers
More honors floor friends at Golden Gardens
"You Reap What You Sow" - University Singers small group, conducted by Jeremy Morada and Joel Bevington