Here are the guidelines for your end-of-unit reflection:
- In your Reflection, I want you to discuss the following:
- What did you learn in this unit? Be sure to provide specific examples and page numbers.
- What did you find interesting/uninteresting in this unit?
- What challenged you in this unit? What came easy?
- After experiencing this unit, what do you look forward to trying out in your short fiction assignment?
- Reflections must be AT LEAST 200 words.
- Include your full name at the end of your reflection. Unnamed comments will be deleted.
- From the "Comment As" drop-down menu, choose Anonymous, then click "Publish."
- This Reflection is due by midnight on Thursday, 11/29, no exceptions.
My toughest section yet, has been poetry. It was hard for me because I struggled a bit more when I had to use some sort of format that was more strict. It was also hard for me to think of what to write. I know poetry can be about anything from any genre. So, I feel I was pressured into choosing something to write about. It did get easier once I thought of something to write about. All my thoughts came to me at once and I honestly just wrote it down. To me, poetry is also a little dark. Maybe that’s because of what I was feeling at the time I as trying to write, but for the most part I haven’t really read anything happy and jolly. Those kinds of poems are the ones I’m more attractive to. So trying to write the poems all I could come up with were sad and hurting ones. I tried hard to think of a happy and satisfying one. But, overall I really enjoyed writing some poems. This genre really taught me how to open up my eyes and feelings. I’m excited to see what else I can write for poetry, especially when I become a better writer myself. Also when I become more familiar with the format and all the technical things about poetry.
ReplyDeleteVictoria Ann Gonzalez
Poetry is very fun. I love reading it. Poetry will teaches word economy, because in a poem, not a single word is wasted. Poets strive for finding the most effective words to convey each thought, emotion or idea. It uses powerful imagery. Poems are the epitome of “show, don’t tell.” In a poem, you don’t have a lot of time or space to spend narrating or telling the reader what’s happening. Poets create strong visuals for their readers, truly giving the reader a glimpse of their subjects. It is inspiring. Love it or hate it, poetry provokes powerful emotions. A well-crafted line of poetry can stick with us for a long time. Sometimes, a poem or even just a memorable line, can make us want to write about that. The emotional response we have to the poem can often lead to an outlet for our own ideas. No matter what kind of writing you do, reading poetry can be a great way to improve my writing skills. The principles of poetry can be applied to nearly every kind of writing you do. Let’s take a look at what we can learn from poetry.
ReplyDeleteFatimata Traore
Out of all the units we have covered this semester, poetry has to be the one that I’m having a hard time composing my ideas and putting them into a poem that I find to my satisfaction. With the other units, once I had a clear idea of what I wanted to write about (well aside from creative non-fiction) it didn’t take me long to begin writing. However, I did enjoy all the poems we read and hearing the different interpretations from other students helped me understand and see the poems in a different view than my own. I feel like when I read poems, and depending on the content, it’s hard for me to digest exactly what is going on when they seem either straightforward or ambiguous (or as we discussed in class, ambiguously straightforward). The poems I found to be the most stimulating to my mind were the ones with sensory or vivid details, because it provides me with a clearer image and help me see what the poet may be describing or talking about. I think that is the kind of free verse poem I would like to attempt, thought I’m not sure how well that will be since I believe one thing I lack in is describing things in full details. Nonetheless, I know I would prefer having to compose poems with structures like a Shakespearean but I also believe it’s better to challenge ourselves and not always rely on a format to help us out.
ReplyDelete- Savannah Lopez
We’ve only had one class on poetry, but it was fun. I’m excited to read my poems next Tuesday for our class. I’m very proud of what I wrote, and this short segment helped me with my confidence in my poetry (mostly reading it!). The difficult aspect of poetry that I don’t understand still is meter. What is meter? What does it do? Is it make-believe? Who made it up? So many questions, and the answers elude me! For this segment of the course, I read the textbook’s explanation and then batted away the confusion and wrote my poems, undisturbed, from the solitude of my heart and the prompts. What was very interesting in this section that I did not find interesting until we met together as a class were the poets’ backstories. These poets accomplished so much in their lives, and most of them had master’s degrees. It inspired me to consider going for a master’s. My favorite part of this unit was the rondeau poem form from the book. It’s a french form, and it’s beautiful. I did not use this form in my own writing but I did admire the examples in the book. I do look forward to revising my poems for my final portfolio at the end of class.
ReplyDeleteRaquel Williams
Despite this unit being short, I learned about poetry and improved my understanding poetry such as the elements of poetry on pg. 19 to 20 and that these elements are required to compose poetry, excluding the poetic forms. What I took to heart was that poetry is a way of slowing down in a world of haste.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I didn’t find poetry very interesting, apart from one of the poems, Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War between Races by Lorna Dee Cervantes, since it had capture my attention and engaged me throughout the poems, till the end of course. So, in other words, I found myself often uninterested with this unit to the end since I didn’t find amazing and breathtaking like others did in my class.
Also, I was constantly challenged with analyzing and understanding the poems that we read for this unit. Therefore, I felt frustrated to analyze and understand poetry within an academic environment. To be honest, nothing was easy in this unit, especially my discussion last week wasn’t as perfect as I wished it would be. I struggled and struggled to comprehend how my peers understood and analyze these poems more successfully than I do.
Lastly, after learning poetry, I don’t look forward to trying out much in my poetry assignment, just incorporating the essentials to my assignment, no more or less than those essentials.
Jose Contreras | 242 words
Surprisingly, I found this unit to be kind of fun. I don’t consider myself to be anything near a poet so I thought I would struggle with this unit, but I found it relatively easy. I was able to gain a bit of more understanding of poetry with the pages discussing Meter and Rhythm (31-38). I found just reading the poems in general to be interesting. The ones that I could understand I found to be enjoyable. With that said, there were a lot of poems that I did not understand. Which would be the most challenging aspect of this unit. I had trouble understanding the meaning of most poems and was left confused after reading them. Not understanding something of the bat then having to analyze it at a deeper level was a pain. I thought having to write my own poetry would be difficult, but It actually came pretty easy. Mainly because you can bullshit the text and it can somehow be considered “poetry”, I think at least. Overall, I look forward to experimenting with more free verse style poetry. Since I think it’s the easiest but can have its challenging aspects. It’ll be fun to try to come up with something good.
ReplyDelete-Adrian Martinez
Poetry is not one of my strengths, particularly because I find writing free verse poetry to be really difficult. The lack of distinct rules makes the poem rely on its meter and rhythm, or it could also use the lack thereof as justification for not having qualities that define a poem, which is why personally, more formal poetry is more meaningful to write. Poetry’s goal is to be attractive and have a feeling of nuance and mystery in what its meaning is. In free verse, you can make just about any commentary, and it does not even have to rhyme. Of course rhyming is difficult, but I believe it adds to its own value by the very nature of what a poem is. If you wanted to write a haiku, but decided not to use the syllables format, then you aren’t really writing a haiku. Sonnets, rondeaus, and all the types of formal poems add a style. A free verse poem is like ordering a pizza randomly, you’ll get whatever’s thrown on, but when you order the specific Hawaiian pizza, you can taste the synergizing flavors, and understand that it’s a cut above a “build your own pizza”. I don’t mean to devalue the importance of the content in these free verse poems. The poems in the readings, like ‘Basketball” and “Santa Fe” have a distinct cultural connotation, “A Quiet Poem” connects the mood of melancholy poems with different situations that feel universal. The content is important, and I can appreciate it, but in my own work, I would want to strive for the eloquence of formality.
ReplyDelete-Kedrick Wyatt
This section of poetry has been one of my personal favorites that we have covered in this class. Although it has been really confusing at times, it has also been pretty fun to try and figure out the meanings behind some of the poems that we read or to compare our different interpretations with one another in class. In this section, I have experienced that our understandings of poetry are often subjective. For example, when we were discussing the poem “Left Field” by D. Nurkse, it seemed that most of us did not find the poem to be very moving or all that meaningful; however, after hearing more about what the title meant and how it related to the rest of the poem, it became easier to get a better sense of what it was the poem was trying to convey. I found it interesting how this poem was able to get through to certain individuals while others, including myself, did not feel the same kind of connection. It is cool to see how our backgrounds, knowledge, and own selves are able to significantly influence the kind of experience we have with poetry. In addition, I enjoyed how most of the poems that we covered and how poems in general have this sort of ambiguity and how their meanings are not directly brought across and rather require to take a closer look at what is written and make connections. Because of engagement of thought that mystery provokes, I hope to try and work this seventh element of poetry into my own writing and create something that calls for closer inspection, rather than being quite direct about the kind of message that I am trying to send.
ReplyDeleteKimberly Cervantes
This section of poetry has been one of my personal favorites that we have covered in this class. Although it has been really confusing at times, it has also been pretty fun to try and figure out the meanings behind some of the poems that we read or to compare our different interpretations with one another in class. In this section, I have experienced that our understandings of poetry are often subjective. For example, when we were discussing the poem “Left Field” by D. Nurkse, it seemed that most of us did not find the poem to be very moving or all that meaningful; however, after hearing more about what the title meant and how it related to the rest of the poem, it became easier to get a better sense of what it was the poem was trying to convey. I found it interesting how this poem was able to get through to certain individuals while others, including myself, did not feel the same kind of connection. It is cool to see how our backgrounds, knowledge, and own selves are able to significantly influence the kind of experience we have with poetry. In addition, I enjoyed how most of the poems that we covered and how poems in general have this sort of ambiguity and how their meanings are not directly brought across and rather require to take a closer look at what is written and make connections. Because of engagement of thought that mystery provokes, I hope to try and work this seventh element of poetry into my own writing and create something that calls for closer inspection, rather than being quite direct about the kind of message that I am trying to send.
ReplyDeleteKimberly Cervantes
While it was technically more of a refresher for me since I did go over similar stuff in high school, this unit helped teach me about some of the more technical aspects of poetry. Usually I just brush these aside since if I do ever write poetry it tends to be free-verse, but I found sections such as “Meter and rhythm” (page 31) to be especially helpful. Meter and rhythm is something I’ve always struggled to with both when reading and writing poetry; I find it difficult to stick to a particular rhythm and even more difficult to identify what a poem’s rhythm is without over-exaggerating the emphasis on certain syllables. It was nice to have a section that broke down the different types of rhythm and meter and explaining how they can affect the poem without getting too caught up in technicalities.
ReplyDeleteOf all units, this one was the most uniformly challenging one for me. I felt that we were given even less guidance than in the drama unit, and I understand that’s probably because poetry is one of the more inherently subjective genres, but I also felt it limited my ability to write something effectively. The discussions were fun like always but I also felt that we crammed in so much in such little time that we weren’t able to properly handle all of it. Coming up with a basic idea for a poem wasn’t too hard, but I found it difficult figuring out how to actually execute the idea. I wouldn’t have minded if we maybe had to write one free-verse poem, one fixed-form poem, and then maybe even one where we were given a topic to write about because I feel like we would get the best of all worlds that way. I still find poetry writing to be fun though, so long as I’m actually inspired; I consider poetry to be one of the ultimate forms of self-expression and I want to use the poems I write in this class as a form of catharsis.
Elizabeth Garza
Going into the final section of the course, poetry was my weakest and least practiced form of writing plus I’m not one for coming up with rhymes. For who has the time? But reading into Starkey’s work, I was glad to be reminded that free verse poetry is a thing. Starkey mentions on page 17 that “…an effort has long been under way to capture the power of poetry without having to adhere to strict metrical patterns and rhyme schemes.” This will hopefully continue on into the English classes in public schools, to start off students with easy poetry and encourage them to continue, whether as a past time or professionally. After writing a few amateur, dust collecting poems for class I am thinking of continuing to write poetry when I can. What I liked about this unit was learning more about free verse and how it’s being furtherly integrated into classrooms and as an acceptable choice of style. One quote that brought reassurance was Wendy Bishop on getting started on writing poetry, “There is no single, best… invention technique that will get all writers drafting productively.”(Page 68). She goes on to say that the process is more exploratory than a strict agenda-checklist following. There is more than one way to write poetry and it should be universally adapted to other subjects. After going through this section, I am looking forward to diving further into free verse poetry.
ReplyDeleteMichael Lucio (238 Words)