Process of Writing a Poem

As part of an assessment for my Creative Writing class, I had to write 40 lines of poetry. I don't write a lot of poetry and English is not my native language, so I was dreading it more than the other elements. But I did it and I was quite happy with the result, so I'm sharing my process here.

As with any other piece of writing, I started with brainstorming. I've written a murder ballad about Sasaeng before and found it more enjoyable than other forms of poetry, so I was considering writing another one. Prose poetry was on my mind as well as I was reading Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey at the time. But as I worked on the outline of content, theme and mood, I really didn't like the emotional state I was getting myself into. I don't mind crying or immersing myself in a character who's suffering, but at that point, I was feeling low anyway and I felt like this was just making it worse.

My tutor had given me the idea to write about Kpop for my Creative Non-Fiction piece, so it struck me that I could also write poetry about that. As I had just started watching Kingdom: Legendary War, that was on my mind and suddenly I was struck by the idea of turning a performance into a poem. I chose my favourite performance at that point, ATEEZ's Wonderland.

With that choice made, I started by writing down a description of the action in the performance to get the storyline straight. I also rewatched their commentary on Kingdom and that brought me the realisation that I needed to understand more about ATEEZ and the story they've been telling with their music video, performances and such.

I started with the 'Wonderland' music video and BookishTheories' explanation of it, but that didn't satisfy me. In particular, I was missing an explanation for the hourglass, which was given a prominent role in the performance.

As I didn't have much time left until my deadline, I knew I was in need of assistance. I reached out to ATINY, the fans of ATEEZ, in the comments of the YouTube video of the performance and on the subreddit r/ATEEZ. They were incredibly friendly and helpful and pointed me to the Diary Films and explanations of the time travel happening in ATEEZ's storyline.

With their help, I got my storyline straight and I could focus on tone. Something that stood out to me in the performance was the arrangement of Wonderland, the use of different music mixed in to create shifting tone and emotion. I rewatched the performance, adding indicators of tone and audio cues to my notes.

The section most strongly contrasting with the rest, is the dance break with the skeletons. A word they used to describe it while coming up with the concept was uncanny. As I had recently had a conversation with an Art History student about the uncanny, or "unheimlich", in the arts, I wanted to lean into that and did a bit more research into uncanny poetry. Unfortunately, most uncanny poetry is much longer than I wanted to dedicate to that section but the theory behind the uncanny, taking the familiar, "heimlich", and twisting it to be unfamiliar, "unheimlich", gave me the idea to take familiar words but twist the sentence structure. The use of bone-breaking dance is quite striking in that section, so I threw in some words connected to the body, hopefully adding to the uncanniness. It was only much later in the editing process that I had the idea to use formatting to strengthen this effect, making use of inverted letters, sub- and superscript and similar effects.

For the parts where ATEEZ made use of classical songs, I used more traditional poetic styles, with regular meters and rhyming schemes. For the scene where the Kraken is defeated, which had an imperial tone, I looked to Enlightenment-era poetry, borrowing a line from John Milton's 1645 poem Song on a May Morning. "Thus we salute thee with our early song" became "Thus we salute thee with our song" in my poem, standing out against the rest of the poem due to its use of older grammar.

In contrast, for the parts where ATEEZ's typical and modern sound shines, I made use of more modern poetic forms like free verse, still keeping rhythm and sound in mind but letting it flow more loosely. For the more quiet moments of the performance, such as the Kraken's appearance, where the music fades, leaving only the Kraken's roar, I made use of wide spacing, placing single words per line and indenting them to different degrees.

One problem I ran into while writing this, was their names. Unlike some other kpop groups, ATEEZ doesn't use English stage names, as is obviously their right, but as I was writing this for an assignment with my teachers being very British, I feared using their Korean names would create a degree of separation I didn't intend to create. I hesitated at first, being well aware of the problematic nature of a white person taking art by a person of colour and removing part of its cultural context, but in the end, I chose to change their names to more familiar-sounding ones so the poem would have the desired effect while making sure I always referenced back to my inspiration.

As for the names I chose, I pulled them from ideas ATEEZ, their company and fans had mentioned. San stayed San as this wasn't too unfamiliar. Hoongjoong became Captain as is his role in the performance and the team. Seonghwa became Mars, which had been a possible stage name as Hwaseong is the name of the planet Mars in Korean. The others were English names or nicknames I found references to in different posts from ATINY. A dark version of ATEEZ plays a significant role in their storylines, often referred to as HALA-TEEZ as the song HALA HALA is from their perspective. The time traveller at the beginning of the performance is a member of HALA-TEEZ, so I referred to him as Hala in my poem.

References

I made use of plenty of references in the poem, not all of them to ATEEZ. The following lines are all quotes from the song or performance. The lines not in quotation marks are translated from Korean, slightly altered, or more of a creative interpretation of different parts of the song:

To the beginning where the end is waiting.

“Attention! All eyes on me now!”

...

“Let’s hurry and go!

On my way, we must go on!”

...

“Break it down! We’re on fire!”

...

“Whoever wants to wear the crown, shall bear the crown!”

The journey isn’t easy,

But we have our reasons.

We march to the beat to create our own path.

“On my way, let’s hurry and go!

To the beginning where the end waits!

Let’s Go!”

The line

Compass and glass aiming for pirate kings.

refers not only to the compass and spyglass used in their performance but also their debut song Pirate King.

8 Makes 1 Team

ATEEZ often say this phrase as they are eight members but one team.

Click Shot Boom

A reference to Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 musical Hamilton, I couldn't resist.

You can find the full poem here.