I enjoyed this assignment primarily because the goal was to convey emotion rather than a thesis or something else along the tangible and traditional lines. I knew I would need a pretty powerful poem packed with emotion to get my mind jogging, so naturally I gravitated toward Maya Angelou's work. "Alone" ended up being a great choice because its message was clear and the verses were small enough to slice up into little chunks and sprinkle throughout the ePoem live performance. 

In order to really highlight the emotions I was aiming to convey (namely loneliness), my most effective strategy was juxtaposing happy scenes of people together -- whether it was with their lover, their family, or their children -- against a video of a man navigating through a market alone as he watches groups of people enjoying one another's company. As the video progressed, I replaced the happy scenes with still black and white images of the scene (e.g. the children goofing around together on the playground was replaced with a picture of an empty gray playset) to highlight the feeling of loneliness. 

While I would recommend this assignment, I do want to acknowledge the obstacles I discovered during its production. If I made any mistake, I would have to stop the recording and start completely over. With so many moving pieces of the assignment -- from playing multiple sound clips at once to starting videos at different times while all the while typing out the poem -- there were endless opportunities for making mistakes. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally clicked the wrong video or picture on my dashboard; perhaps it's my fault for incorporating so much material, but it was frustrating and required extra time so I could develop a strategy to minimize error. Even when I navigated through the entire performance flawlessly, mistakes still slithered their way into the performance; my operating system would pop-up with a weekly update or my Messages application would ding with a text message. Finally completing the live ePoem with no (er, minimal) mistakes, however, was a reward in it of itself. 

The major success of this assignment is comparing it to the edited version of the ePoem. Doing so reveals much about my own growth in utilizing sonic and visual elements, and also explicitly illustrates the differences between a live and edited performance and its impact on each project's respective message and effectiveness. To check out the edited version of "Alone" and my reflection on producing edited ePoetry, click here.