Finding Poetic Voice and Poetic View through Creative Arts Influence and Thoughts
At this stage of my creative exploration, I find myself in the process of identifying and shaping a poetic voice and poetic view, both as an artist and as a student of Creative Arts. This is not a static point, but a moving journey influenced by personal experience, memory, and cultural encounter, as well as the works and thoughts of other artists who have walked similar paths. My work so far blends emotional truth, irony, nostalgia, and visual experimentation. I approach poetry not only as text, but as texture: something that can be layered, disrupted, romanticised, and transformed.
My recent work includes writing sound, experimental, and found poetry. I’ve also explored visual-text relationships using tools like Canva, where I combine romantic imagery with ironic or dissonant text. These juxtapositions allow me to disrupt the idealised versions of memory or love and instead open a space for re-interpretation. This aesthetic tension, between beauty and irony, memory and criticism, has become a key component of my evolving poetic view.
One of the central themes in my work is romanticised imagery and its disruption. I’ve been strongly influenced by the visual irony of artists such as Banksy, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Banksy’s use of stenciled street art, often pairing soft or innocent imagery with harsh political critique, has shown me how poetry, too, can function in layers. I especially admire how Banksy’s art carries weight and humour simultaneously. Warhol’s detachment and repetition are strategies I consider when trying to transform personal memory into something that resonates more universally. With Basquiat, what strikes me is the rawness, the fusion of text and image, the energetic chaos that somehow makes a coherent whole. These influences have led me to ask: how can I bring depth, humour, and critique into poetic form without losing emotional authenticity?
Poetically, I’ve also been drawn to the work of Nikos Kavvadias, a Greek poet and sailor whose life at sea shaped his deeply atmospheric and introspective poems. There is something in his worldview that I relate to: perhaps because, like him, I have lived much of my adult life abroad, navigating unfamiliar lands, new people, and the emotional toll of constant movement. Kavvadias uses the sea as both a literal and metaphorical space. Similarly, I see my own journey ,especially my time in China and now in the Isle of Man as a personal odyssey. These travels, relationships, and fragments of solitude offer rich material for poetic transformation.
In some ways, I also see poetry as a kind of fashioning: a process not unlike the fashion industry itself, which I currently work in. Just as I take raw materials (yarns , knitting machine, needles) and shape them into garments that are refined and beautiful, I approach words, memories, and sounds as raw material to be shaped into poetic garments. I create knitwear for high end customers, yet at the same time I try to “weave” my own voice through the creative arts. This metaphor allows me to see my creative practice as deeply intertwined: emotional labour and artistic labour are not separate, but speak to each other.
One of the biggest challenges I face is balancing the personal with the universal. I want my poetry to be accessible and meaningful to others: not just a diary entry. This requires shaping experience into metaphor, image, and sound that invites the reader in, rather than shutting them out. I want people to feel something, to see themselves in the work.
There are moments in my daily life when I feel like I’m inside a poem without having written one. For example, while walking with music in my ears, observing the surroundings, I sometimes feel as though I’m in a music video. The soundtrack, the scenery, the emotional texture, these sensations form what I call poetic view. This way of seeing and feeling the world is at the heart of how I want to write. Not just to describe life, but to live through poetry.
This course is not simply about writing individual poems, but about constructing a way of thinking and seeing that is poetic at its core. My ambition is to keep experimenting, to find new forms and formats, new ways to talk, installations, or even small publications, that express both my poetic voice and my visual view.
To conclude, Finding Poetic Voice and Poetic View through Creative Arts Influence and Thoughts is not just a title: it is a journey I am on. Through every memory, every image, every ironic twist or romantic yearning, I get closer to understanding who I am as an artist to be. The influences are many, the questions are still open, but the work continues: poem by poem, image by image story by story.
Alexander's blog 