1. Discuss your history with reading and writing about poetry. What do you know or assume about poetry and how to read it and write about it? What have you liked about poetry in the past? What have you found most challenging?
Ever since I can remember I have always loved reading poems even when I despised reading. I loved reading poems because they were simple and easy to read and understand at times. The first poem I can remember is “Rose is Red, Violets are blue, Sugar is sweet and So are you” poem. I remember writing and reading about poems in elementary and middle school it was the only time I looked forwards to English class.. I even wrote a poem to enter in a scholar ship award once in high school. I did not win, but was offered to have it published in a poem book, but I declined the offer. We wrote Haiku, ballads, imagery, sonnets, limericks, and free verses. When I was writing these poems after the initial struggle of starting the poem I felt like it was a direct link to how I was feeling. An easy outlet it seemed to flow from my mind painting a picture to unknown places and emotions.
2. Of the three poems we read this week, which of them evoked the strongest response in you and which did you find most striking? Describe the response and explain what details in the poem contributed to that response.
In Fifth grade autobiography it is about a person I think a girl looking a picture and describing it and reminiscing about the good old days when their grandfather was still alive and smelled of lemons.
In Mid-term Break it is about the eldest son who went away to college only to be called back home six weeks later to his little brother funeral. At first this was the poem that I understood and felt the most emotions tow...
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...uTube and watched one were the teacher told the children to rip out Mr. Pritchard’s thoughts about how to analyze poems. He told the children that Mr. Pritchard views were wrong and his way of showing this was to rip out the pages containing his views. When I heard the teacher tell the students to rip out the pages I couldn’t help but think I couldn’t agree with what he said to do because I wouldn’t want to pay the school for the book. I understand that Mr. Pritchard views were wrong, but I guess I do not understand his reasoning for such dramatics. Even though it was very funny to watch especially when the other guy barged in and demanded to know what the children were doing and then he realized the head teacher was in there telling them do rip out the pages. In all I feel the movie and book are telling us to keep an open mind about what the poems meaning is.
Poetry is often created by an author’s need to escape the logical, as well as expressing feelings and other expressions in a tight, condensed manner. Hundreds of poets have impacted society throughout history through phenomenal poetry that, even with dark tones can be emotionally moving.
“I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive…” (3); so begins a poem titled “Introduction To Poetry” by Billy Collins. “Introduction To Poetry” is, in fact, the introduction to a collection of poetry called Poetry 180, a program started by Collins during his time as poet laureate for the United States. The aim of this program is to get people, especially teenagers, interested in or reconnected with poetry. Collins selected an assortment of poems that are just fun to read and not meant to be discussed; he says in the forward to the collection, “High school is the focus of my program because all too often it is the place where poetry goes to die” (xvii). Collins was honored with the title of poet laureate in 2001 because of his own outstanding poetry. Billy Collins is considered by some to be the greatest American poet since Robert Frost because he connects with his readers, he makes the mysterious ordinary, and he portrays the ordinary as mysterious.
The poems make for a simple addition to the narrative and allows for a much more meaningful experience for a reader and makes for a much more engrossing story, thus adding to the experience as a whole.
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
A character’s attempt to recapture the past is important in many poems and stories. " Fifth Grade Autobiography" by Rita Dove, succeeds at recapturing the poet's past. The poem's speaker is a the author and the addresse is the audience. The subject of the poem is one of remembrance. The tone is childlike, innocent and sadness and the theme is reminiscent. We discover the poet is describing a particular memory that shows reverence and longing for her grandfather, who is dead at the time she writes the poem. Dove recaptures memories as a child on a particular day and her interaction with her brother and grandparents especially her grandfather with great detail. The author recaptures the memory in the poem by looking at an old photo and describing, the things that were taking time at the place of the picture not exactly what is pticutred..
Empathy is one major reason. In this current day and age, it seems more and more like we are unable to feel more for the plights and experiences others go through. Poetry itself is an expression of experiences that occur in all the different parts of the human experience and one could learn much from the experiences written from someone who different from them. The poems written during the Harlem Renaissance articulates the perspectives and feelings that African Americans were experiencing during that time and that we are still seeing some of today. One could read poems from these times and really consider what the author is trying to say and could possibly find themselves a bit empathetic towards
The poems facilitate the investigation of human experience through illustrating life’s transience and the longevity of memory.
The poems I'm about to write for you are some great poems.“The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is about the Blacksmith that is a strong and honest man having crisp black hair and having muscular arms, he works hard from morning to evening. While the children are returning from school they like to catch the burning sparks .“My old Kentucky Home” by Stephen Foster was inspired by “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for the expresses of deep sympathy for African Americans, and talks about the life in Kentucky These two poems are a good example of how happy both of the poems are. Even though these poems have many things in common like elision and theme they both end in a pretty happy setting.
I am not very good at writing, or even reading poetry, which may be one of the reasons that it is my least favorite. It is honestly not a form of writing that I enjoy. I feel that it can often times be difficult to break down and understand what the writer is trying to say. I also have trouble with using some of the poetic devices; more particularly I have difficulties with properly using the devices while writing poetry. I never liked when I was assigned poetry writing projects in middle and high school because I’m not very good at it, and as a result I would almost always receive lower grades than any other type of writing assignments. Poetry is a form of writing that I have worked on over the years. I am by no means an expert poet, but I have gotten better at it. Poetry will always be a kind of writing that I can improve
The phrasing of this poem can be analyzed on many levels. Holistically, the poem moves the father through three types of emotions. More specifically, the first lines of the poem depict the father s deep sadness toward the death of his son. The line Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy creates a mental picture in my mind (Line 1). I see the father standing over the coffin in his blackest of outfits with sunglasses shading his eyes from the sun because even the sun is too bright for his day of mourning. The most beautiful scarlet rose from his garden is gripped tightly in his right hand as tears cascade down his face and strike the earth with a splash that echoes like a scream in a cave, piercing the ears of those gathered there to mourn the death of his son.
Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia, eds. An Introduction to Poetry. 13th ed. New York: Longman, 2010. 21. Print.
Poems do many things for a person. The words in a certain poem can have many different affects on many different people. They can incite laughter or tears, anger or serenity, fear or reassurance, hope or despair. These feelings are unable to be helped or coached. They happen naturally and without thought. The responses that each reader gives, however, is quite different. These are thought about long and hard. They are the "whys" of a poem's affect on us. Why do they give us whatever feeling it is they give us? Why do we cry at one poem and laugh at another? Why and how do we, as the reader, get into the poem?
"Prose and Verse Criticism of Poetry." Representative Poetry On-line: Version 3.0. Ed. D. F. Theall. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2009. .
The poem’s tone evolves around acceptance. Unlike in “Mid Term Break”, the poem has no true sadness or funerals, there seems not to be any real emotions shown by other family members. For example, there is no body grieving over the death of this boy. The people who witnessed the accident accepted this accident as they would an earthquake, a natural disaster that can’t be prevented.
When I think of poetry that touched me early in life, I immediately think of authors from the Harlem Renaissance, poets like Countee Cullen, Margaret Walker, Claude McKay, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. I was introduced to these poets through an old anthology compiled by Arna Bontemps called American Negro Poetry (first printed in 1963). Later on, in high-school, as I began to get more serious about words, I was really dazzled by James Dickey's collection, Poems 1957-1967 and W.S. Merwin's collection, The Lice. I was captured by the daring inventiveness of Ai's Cruelty and The Killing Floor. Her work with persona poems gave rise to a series of my own persona poems. Then came my fascination with Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa and Cemetery Nights by Stephen Dobyns. Also, there was a collection by David Ignatow entitled Rescue The Dead which, though I've long since lost, I still think about the variety of poems, the humor and soulful honesty.