Lets start of by saying I' am absolutely, positively not a fan whatsoever of Poetry, but coming into this I said I would be open-minded. Well, that was a fail. So, I took the assignments class by class and as we began breaking down the poems together, everything started to make sense at once. Some of the tactics that many of my peers said they used helped. Especially, those who said they looked up words they didn't know, read the poems more than once and did some background research. So, as I read The Gutteral Muse, I took line by line and tried to break it down to gather the entire picture being presented. It didn't come to me at first, so I had to read it again and for words I didn't know, I looked them up and tried to figure out a way to incorporate the meaning into the poem. By the end of the poem, I had grasped some the main points and I felt accomplished. The class discussion helped even more as I sat and listened to other's ideas of what they thought. Other's view points always help you see things differently and see a concept that never crossed your mind from the beginning. Also, the list we made of "things we noticed" in one column and "connections" in another was very useful as well. The list, too, showed you the poem in another light. The more and more I use these tactics I was presented with, helped make reading poems much easier. I feel a little better about poetry and my feelings toward this unit has had a slight change of heart. Lets see how long I can keep this up.
-Diamond Quarles
Diamond,
ReplyDeletegreat! I am glad to hear that the activities we did in class were helpful, too. I can give you some recommendations for other poets, if you're interested in seeing how far you'd like to go in your poetry exploration. I think the thing about poetry is: Even if you haven't liked poetry so far, there are enough poets out there that I bet you can find someone you like. :-)