Finishing Up w/ Poetry
As we finish the anthology, I would like you to think about some of the following questions:
- These are, according to Gioia and Lehman the "best" poems of 2018.
Can you generalize about what it takes to write a "best" poem? What did
you learn about poetry over the last few weeks? How did these readings
confirm, or challenge, your previous feelings about poetry?
- Which poem was your favorite? Which poem did you struggle w/ the most?
- Kay Ryan's poem, "Some Transcendent Addiction to the Useless" quotes from critic George Steiner's The Poetry of Thought
in her title. It's my understanding that Steiner argues that truly
great art is bound up with "useless" skills (like writing poetry). This
brings us back to our discussion on the first day: How useful is it to
read poetry? To write it? Why are you required to do it in 102? Are you
glad that you had to read a book of poetry? Or was it annoying? Or
both?
- What questions do you still have about poetry, or about any of the poems in the anthology?
At first thought poems was hard on general butlearning how to write one which am different types of poems as my collection it helps to give me better understanding how to read them and do get better understanding why it's needed but what challenges me still with poetry is sometimes finding the right words to say
ReplyDeleteOver the last week I learned that poetry wasn't just rhyming stanzas and It could be quite long sometimes. I learned that poetry could even seem like short story sometimes although its really still poetry. The Tilia Cordata poem was the poem that made realize poems were more then just rhymes, couple lines and short stanzas. Although I learned more about different kinds of poetry I still don't quite like poetry because its not easy to interpret. It was easier to understand when we had partners or group members to help.
ReplyDeleteFor me, reading and writing poetry is annoying because some poems are easy to understand their wordings but other are difficult because the mind has to be open in order to understand what the writer is trying to express. In my opinion the best poems are the ones that go straight to the ground in a sense that the reader understands from the first stanza.
ReplyDeleteIn generalizing about what it takes to write a poem I would state that knowledge of vocabulary is an important aspect. It is my belief that to write a “good” poem, one must have good command of vocabulary. Words have meaning and knowing which words to incorporate in a poem in order to get a particular message across stems from knowledge of vocabulary. Familiarity with figurative language is also useful as different literary devices can be used to represent and idea or a thought in a “good” poem. Over the past few weeks, I have learned that poetry is not as boring and uninteresting to read and understand the message that the author is trying to convey. Knowing now about Haiku, Terza Rima, rhyming and non-rhyming structures, creative constraints, symbolism, and other literary devices that poets use to construct a poem makes it easier to appreciate poems. Previously, I was never enthusiastic about reading poems because I had little exposure to understanding poem development and being able to analyze a poem to understand the message that the poet was trying to convey. With the knowledge I have gained thus far, in this class, I believe I can be more receptive to reading and understanding a poem. My favorite poem was “Love Poem: Chimera” because of the use of symbolism particularly a mythical creature being compared to a human body to explain what humans had become. The poem “Yonder, a Rental” was most difficult to understand, for in my opinion the verses did not portray what I expected from the title of the poem. Writing poetry is a difficult task if a writer wants to create a “good” poem, but I do not agree that it is useless. A person can learn from one discipline and use the things that they’ve learned in other disciplines. So, examining poems and trying to understand the meaning of the poem is not useless. I might have had the opposite view before taking this class but now I realize that having the knowledge to understand a poem and its meaning can never be useless. English 102 requires poetry because poetry involves using English vocabulary, English language devices and literary structures, so it is understandable that poetry would be a requirement of English 102. Initially, I would have stated that I was annoyed to have to read and decipher poems but being shown the way that poems should be or could be interpreted I can now read a poem and appreciate the work that the poet puts into creating a “good poem.” In English, when I meet a difficult word, I can use a dictionary to clarify its meaning. But with a poem it’s difficult to know if one’s interpretation is similar to the thoughts of the poet that wrote the poem, additionally, there isn’t any way to know if my understanding of the poem is what the poet intended.
ReplyDeleteDuring these past few weeks I was reintroduced into poetry and I remembered just how complex poetry can be. Poems like "love poem: Chimera" for example really made me think hard about what exactly was the author trying to say. I had to basically make sense of these stories in my own way and I was reminded that poetry is an art because of that.
ReplyDeleteAs you were going over in class, poetry can be seen as a *useless skill*. Useless skill, meaning that it can be very notable in one subject but may not be as effective in another. I have created a collection of poems before and it was very interesting but that was in elementary school. I really enjoyed it to be fairly honest, because I was allowed to share my thoughts on subjects that people would think that a 8 year old boy wouldn't be able to comprehend. It was very interesting to revisit this topic, although I'm not really into poetry. My favorite poem that we've read in this semester would have to be a drug poem, I can't really remember the name, that was introduced to me during one of the group critiques. It was very interesting, fun to read, it had a rhyme scheme, the vibe of the poem was very inviting and fun, and I couldn't help myself from continuing to read it.
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