Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

I’d like to sincerely thank you for giving my multi genre piece your time and patience. Certainly, it is a generic showing of gratitude, but nonetheless I mean it. I do not think that this project is the “peak” of all I have done this year. In fact, I do not think that the point of this assignment was to somehow lump everything from this year, the hundreds of thousands of words written and the thousands of pages read. No, I think that the point of this assignment was to reflect on what we have done, not summarize. So, in my opinion, I have done just that. I’ve read the poems, and I’ve analyzed the texts, so now it is my turn to take the role of the author and see what sort of chops I’ve developed.

The first piece is, of course, the expository essay, which argues that it is beneficial to bring athletics to impoverished you. The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, was a heartwarming and inspiring story that got me thinking about how sports have affected my life, and how it could improve the lives of others. That was what inspired me to research and argue for athletic’s benefits, because I have learned almost as much in the pool as I have in the classroom. That was formed the basis of my paper, and the rest came easily as it was something that I could write for days about, solely from personal experience if I weren’t to include research. My thesis is what also acted as the golden thread, the theme that sports are an effective equalizer and overcome socioeconomic and cultural divides to “even the playing field” (I know, I know, punny).

The first genre piece is a series of four Haikus, called “You Probably Know…”. I know what you’re thinking: Really, Sean, haikus? You would be partially right, but I thought that the message that I was trying to portray was actually well suited to be a series of haikus because of its simplicity. I wanted the message to be simple and streamlined, the message being that balls, which act as a metonymy for sports, cannot see color, money, or anything else except for wherever the ball is intended to go. The end of the fourth haiku ends in a dash because a profane word should follow, but it isn’t appropriate nor does it fit the syllable requirement.

The second genre piece is a poem for two voices, “Heart,” and it is fairly obvious that the golden thread is the main message in this one. I consciously made the two voices have the same name to really drive home the idea that the two voices, although different in their economic status, have the same goal and the same means to get there. Like most poems for two voices, I matched up certain lines to make the performance interesting and engaging. What differed, however, was the way in which I made the end stanzas the exact same thing. Once again I wanted to drive home that equality exists in sports, and the like mindedness that two athletes from different backgrounds possess.

The third genre piece is a thank you note, “Thank You for the Chlorine Rashes,” but in the form of a free-verse poem. I wanted to do it in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, which didn’t really make sense when it was prose and not poetry. So, I changed it, and made it a free-verse poem with very little structure. This was meant as an ode to water polo, my favorite sport and the team I was captain of this past spring. Water polo helped me relieve stress, befriend those outside of the classes I took, and really find myself by developing leadership skills and determination. This is gratitude that has built up over the past four year, and in one sitting I let out all of the thoughts and emotions that were attached to this sports flow out onto paper, which really wouldn’t be accurately represented by a neatly organize thank you. I thought it was important to include this piece because, as I mentioned earlier, my experiences with sports inspired me to go the direction I did with this project.

The final piece is a collage, “In Summary,” is meant to be just that, a summary of the entire  project in one image. It contains the cover of The Boys in the Boat, a picture of the pool to represent my own experiences, a picture of the actual team the The Boys in the Boat is about, and images of different sports being played by different cultures, which is essentially what my golden thread was.

This project was took time and took away sleep, but in the end I’m more than happy with the final result. I hope that, as I think this project was meant to achieve, you can understand the incredible amount of knowledge and skills that I absorbed this year, and I hope you enjoyed my writing!
Sincerely,

Sean “Chupi” Finn-Samuels