Month: November 2018

picture by: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Common_Grackle/overview

My first impression of Dodo’s Conundrum wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good either. The poem wasn’t very hard to understand so that was nice, but I didn’t love it. I mean I liked it some but it wasn’t one of my favorites. I liked that he used many allusions because it made it easier to understand what was going on in the poem. It allowed him to not have to explain exactly what he was thinking or feeling and left it up to the reader to interpret it. I think that the theme is that if you want to change your experience then you have to change your patterns. I think that throughout the poem the author made it clear that what seemed to be the perfect model world wasn’t enough and what was his life wasn’t good enough either but he wasn’t doing anything about it. He was just observing everything but not taking action. I didn’t really have any questions after I did the sound and sense questions. Once we did those it helped everything make sense and come together. The sound and sense questions were much easier to do then they were for Eldorado. I still have some trouble identifying the rhyme scheme and patterns, but it is getting easier the more I do it. I liked this poem more than Eldorado because I thought it was easier to understand. I also thought that the topic and theme was more relevant to my own life. In Eldorado, I couldn’t relate to what was going on or the idea of searching for wealth and material things but never finding it, where Dodo’s Conundrum was easier to relate to because sometimes you are just an observer and are not doing anything to change the events in your life. Now that I have had to write some poetry I pick up on some literary devices way quicker, which makes it so much easier to understand. When I was reading this poem all the allusions that are in it stood out to me so much quicker. It didn’t take so long for me to find them and to figure out what they had to do with the poem.

Picture by: https://thejohnfox.com/2016/05/poetry-submissions/

Now that we are taking a look back at all the poetry we have done I still do not like it. I still don’t understand the rhythm and rhyme schemes. What does iambic and trochaic even mean? I don’t understand how you can incorporate a rhyme pattern so easily and still have your poem make sense. I also don’t know how the syllables work, and how you determine whether it is stressed or unstressed. I just can’t wrap my mind around it all. The only thing that changed throughout this unit was how I understood poetry. I think that I can interpret it better. I also think that it is easier to write poetry since we looked at so many examples and realized it doesn’t have to be that serious. My second poem is just like my first one. I took the same concept of death and just changed the way I looked at it. I used the emotions from when my grandmother died and I incorporated them into my poem. This time I go through the process of blame when someone you care about dies. I think that this poem is better than my first one because I think it is more accurate for most. I think that more people could relate to what goes through your head when you experience death and grief. After watching Billy Collins Ted Talk it made me think about what I could/would do if I had to do the same thing as him. It makes you question how you incorporate images without giving the entire poem and meaning away to the reader. I think that I would use one person going through the events after the death of someone, but I wouldn’t completely give it away that someone died. I would just show the actions they did and hope that the reader can pick up on what is going on. I would want it to flow well and have it go from one thing to another quickly because the way I wrote my poem I think that it all happens so quickly and your emotions change so rapidly. I would use dark colors as well just for a symbolic reason since death is always “dark times”.

Picture by: http://artcenter.org/event/community-poetry-writing-workshop/

When we started taking a deeper look at poetry, I was a little irritated. Honestly, I do not like poetry, so when we started learning about what all these little things mean and how rhyme schemes work it just seemed like a lot of nonsense. Once we actually started looking at poems and how these elements of poetry are used in them it makes it so much easier to understand them. You start reading poems and the things start jumping out at you. It made it so much easier for me to understand. I really liked the poem Eldorado. I thought it was interesting and I also was able to understand it much easier. I thought the author did a really good job of adding certain allusions like the “Valley of the Shadows”. It made it clear that he was essentially chasing death, and that he was never going to find “Eldorado”. Our class discussion just made me realize that the theme was more about the chase for something he loves. Once I realized that that was the theme, it made so much more sense based on what we know about Edgar Allen Poe. He lost so many loved ones in his life that it makes sense that all he wanted was to find something he really loved and for it not to go away. The poem I am writing is about death. I decided to write about how I felt when my grandmother died when I was ten. Since it was so long ago I had to really dig deep to try to remember all the emotions I went through when it happened. I blocked most of it out so having to remember it all again was difficult. Some of it is a little dramatic. Some of the feelings I felt I had to amplify to make the poem more interesting or to make it more clear about what the poem is about. The biggest struggle I had was trying to find the stanzaic form and rhyme scheme. I needed it to rhyme but I didn’t want it to seem forced. Overall I am starting to like poetry.