Friday, March 6, 2009
Poetry
I can honestly say that writing poetry was much easier for me. For some reason I have a hard time analyzing poetry. It does not come natural to me so I sometimes get frustrated. You have to read between the lines and figure out what the author is trying to say. I liked having the power to write whatever I wanted and have other people figure it out. It was hard at first to open my mind up. Once it was opened, I found myself writing creatively. I liked the rules that Professor Clark provided in class about certain poems we went over. Having a set of rules made it easy for me to follow them and use them as a crutch. For instance, the Wrecking the First Person poem had three sections we had to follow, a true even, a fictional one, and then becoming another person. Having this map made it easier for me to navigate through the writing process. I wanted to create as much visualization as I could in my poetry. I like this in the poetry we read in class. Using the five senses to describe something gives the poetry more substance. The reader is emerged in the poem and the message is felt. Writing poetry made me appreciate the poetry we read in class that much more. I definitely want to provide my future students with this experience. I could not believe the great poetry that came out of our class. Everyone had unique ideas that flourished in their poems. It is going to be fun reading the poetry from my students. I will definitely have them do the Wrecking the First Person poem and the Found poem. These were new poems I hadn’t heard of before. It was a fun way to get started with poetry writing.
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Evelyn, I completely agree that the guidelines that Dr. Clark gave in class were very helpful. Even though writing poems can be creative, it is pretty hard sometimes to come up with a topic. After all, what if nothing comes to mind no matter how hard you try? The guidelines for the “Wrecking the First Person” poem were really helpful and they helped get my thought process going. Otherwise I probably would have just sat there drawing up a blank. The fun thing though was the fact that even though the entire class got the exact same guidelines the finished products were completely different. Some seemed fairly profound while others were downright funny. Either way, the poetry writing exercises helped to show off all of the creative talent in the class. I also felt that creating a found poem helped to show that poetry can come from just about anywhere. After all, I myself pulled a lot of information off of avian and pet care websites in order to come up with a poem about cockatoos. I also liked how others used news and medical websites as their sources.
ReplyDeleteYet again, it was another exercise that showed off just how creative poetry can be.
Hi Evelyn! It is soo true everything that you said about analyzing poetry. I think the Wrecking the first poem was really the first time i actually wrote poetry on my own. I think that the guidelines she gave us is something that we could totally use in the classrooms. I am glad to know that i am not the only one who finds poetry difficult at times. I think that the more i come to understand poetry the more i find myself liking it and i think that's really cool. I think it is really refreshing to know that i am not the only one who is a beginner at poetry:)
ReplyDeleteI’m glad someone else that is English major was as frustrated as me when it comes to poetry. I guess it is because in school, even here at CSUN, I’ve been told the subject and the devices that I have to use. But how are you going to write a poem about a gold fish if you don’t feel like it? (I actually did have to write a poem about a fish once). Then, how are you going to use alliteration in your poems, if it’s hard for you? I think that is what was different in the assignment that Dr. Clark gave us. We did have a structure to follow but it the subject, devices, and choices were still ours. We were still in control and our minds were free to go where ever they felt like it. I like how you aimed your poems to images and visualization. That is really hard and an area that I have a lot of trouble with. Maybe that’s your talent creating images with words.
ReplyDeleteI, too, have an easier time writing poetry than analyzing it, although my real problems comes into putting my thoughts into formal writing. I have difficulties figuring out the best way to divide my thoughts and what would be the most logical flow. Is it best to go line by line? Theme by theme? An overview of the various rhetorical devices and strategies? Since poems are usually pretty compact, it can be hard to explain how one single lines holds so much significance. I agree that given some standards to hold on to, as Dr. Clark gave us for Wrecking the First Person, etc., makes it easier to connect certain things, both in writing and analyzing. If students are shown, not just told how metaphors add to meaning, then they can start to look for and analyze them more on their own, with guided assistance of course.
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