From my creative writing class personal portfolio:

"One thing that needs to be known about me is that I make a point of constantly having some song stuck in my head. I referenced this habit of mine earlier in the portfolio when I was reflecting upon “Consider This a Thank You.” As is expected, a large part of my poetry writing can be traced back to a single major influence – a certain song, a particular story, a quote I enjoyed. I suppose a lot of writing from most authors follows this same pattern of running with influences. The reason I like this poem more than any others I have ever written is that there are multiple of these influences that seem to blend together to make something that is purely me.

The first influence had to be that old proverb, “For the Want of a Nail.” It didn’t really occur to me that anything big was happening when I sat down and started writing. I was just kind of bored during clubs. I quickly plowed through the first stanza without even thinking about what I was typing. “As sharp as a tack that’s been worn thin by time, on a shoe, on a horse, trotting down the line.”

After writing the first stanza I became entranced in the songs which were playing on constant rotation through my mind that day. There were two important songs which contributed themselves to the final product – “Desolation Row” by Bob Dylan and “Yellow Cat Slash Red Cat” by Say Anything. They were both songs with a somewhat melancholic mood about an outside viewer looking in on the world. This is how I ended up writing my poem, with the horse and rider acting as the eyes through which I told the tale.

Some of the pieces of the poem were influenced by events from my life. In particular, the stanza about the “Toy ‘45” was inspired by my next-door neighbor’s children, one of whom accidentally shot the other while playing with a shotgun. This wasn’t a particularly traumatizing event for me – for the most part, I was almost entirely apathetic about it – but I still felt it was a crucial influence on the poem. This stanza was also partially influenced by the line from “Yellow Cat Slash Red Cat,” “I watch my neighbor’s son play with his shotgun in the street.”

After writing the poem, I made a few edits before coming up with the current draft. The first person I turned to for critique (considering she was sitting right next to me as I wrote it) was Maddy. She helped me edit out some awkward phrasing. The line about the ambulance driver was edited so many times it’s not even funny. I started with “The ambulance driver, truly punished for his crime,” and shifted to different variations on that phrase, but it was always unclear of whom I was referring in the participle. It took me a while for me to get the point of that line across, but it was something in particular that I did not want to remove from the poem. I felt it captured one idea I had – “If this hadn’t happened, the ambulance driver wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of driving out here. The boy will get better. The driver’s the one who is paying the price.”

I feel this poem reflects my voice, as it takes many themes and ideas from many different sources and puts them together in a new way that is unique to me as a writer. I also felt that it was a major risk, as it was one of the first poems I wrote in the class, as well as my first poem with such a gloomy mood. These were writing choices which were new to me, and I felt it ended up positively."