Sunday, October 2, 2016

Writing about Poetry and Writing Poetry

Writing about poetry can be an intense experience because it takes people places, sometimes dark places other times beautiful places beyond our imagination.  Trying to figure out the secret meaning that’s hidden within the poem is much like trying to figure out a puzzle with thousands of pieces scattered on the floor. The poems words saved hundreds of years in a time make us time travelers. We can be in any time in history and experience the poets heartbreak even though we’ll never meet them. There are steps that the author took in writing, first they needed to decide the type of poem  out of over fifty different kinds whether a ballad, elegy, or sonnet is able to convey their message.  Writing poetry can be the same for people of the future maybe the people of the 22nd century can read what I wrote and wonder about our current time. Writing about poetry is on a completely different sphere than my setting myself under a tree while pondering the famous authors lifestyle and writing about that. The poetry I’ve read has taught me many a things in life and pushed me to find the underlying meaning the author was trying to get me to grasp. Reading poetry hasn’t made me a better writer of poetry, mainly because nothing interesting, shocking, or emotionally traumatizing has ever happened to me. It’s hard to write about something I don’t know anything about except in the cases when I read others work. That’s what makes great poetry writing about one of the many downfalls of the human experience that would be a way to connect to the people of the present and future. I learned that standing in front of a crowd to read poetry can be interesting and meaningful. I felt my classmate’s emotions as they spoke, they turned their words into images before my eyes, and some were hilarious while others depressing. If, I were to teach poetry having students express themselves in this type of poetry slam would be a positive way to get them to interact and understand each other.

2 comments:

  1. Hello Elisa, great post! It is true that writing poetry can be an intense experience for the writer filled with many and different kinds of emotions. The kind of emotions that can inspire the writer. Like in your poem you used your experiences, or rather, your friend’s experiences to express some emotions that you may have been feeling. It can be a tough thing for writers to do, especially if they are going to have to perform the piece in front of everyone, which makes writing poetry so difficult.

    Great point how writing can be seen as a time vessel, in a way writing is a sort of time machine. Both academic writing and poetry have their own unique ways of being used as time machines; academic writing showing how people thought about writing at a certain time, and poetry showing the emotions of people at that time.

    I love how you got creative in this post with your language use, overall great post Elisa!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Eliza! I really like your reflection about our class poetry assignment. I relate to the simile you use to describe finding the meaning of a poem as, “much like trying to figure out a puzzle with thousands of pieces scattered on the floor.” Every piece of a poem, every word, every dash, every new line, begs for analysis and questioning, leaving one, as the poem analysist, overwhelmed. Often times I have read a poem and seen little things, such as a dash or certain use of a word, and my mind will immediately come up with multiple possible interpretations as I ponder what the poet meant. I also like how you state that “poems words saved hundreds of years in a time make us travelers, we can be in any time in history and experience their heartbreak even though we’ll never meet them.” It’s crazy how literature and poetry provides us as readers insight on sometimes how different times were “back in the days” when the poem was written. Others times, despite the poem having been written decades ago, we can still really connect with the poem’s theme, resonating to a universal aspect of human life. Ultimately, I agree with incorporating poetry slams in class to help get to know each other on a deeper level.

    ReplyDelete