My Kind of Poetry

I think I might as well say it. Poetry is wierd. Like really, confusingly, make my head hurt, read it over and over again with no result weird. I can't say I expected this. I honestly strode into this unit thinking I was the poetry master. Well I was utterly wrong. Not 3 lines into a poem and im already dumbfounded with how many meanings could be in those 3 lines. Not only is the syntax odd, but the concepts are too. The first time you struggle through a poem, you think you understand it. Then you read 10 minutes later and it is like someone completely re-wrote the darn thing. Do I like this aspect? Eh, not really. I like to fully understand what it is I am reading about. Unfortunately for me, poetry doesn't play well with understand. While this bugs me, I think it also has its perks. With this aspect in mind, a poet can simply write how/what/when/why they are thinking and call it a poem. They can craft something unexpectedly beautiful out of a few phrases and have those certain phrases stick to you like glue. That's cool, isn't it? Well, among the finer points of the recent poetry I have been reading, I remembered a childhood poem that may not be so refined. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did and still do.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG19g9oiF-w

Poetry: Initial Reactions

So I was pretty excited to start this poetry unit. I have always enjoyed poetry to an extent and was eager to see what else there was to be discovered about it. That is until we actually started to talk about it in class. Suddenly I found myself saying, "Oh, that kind of poetry". Honestly, there is not a statement that could be more true in my mind. From the get go, I knew that the sometimes rambling diciton and infinetly confusing syntax were going to do me in. I had never explored "proper poetry" from the likes of Dickinson and other renowned poets so I had myself almost convinced that this unit was going to be anything but poetry. Well, as it turns out, I am just going to have to grin and bear it. It looks like I am going to have to once again open my mind to a completely foreign and ambiguous concept. Something that I have already done many times in this class. I really hope that this unit will change my perception of poetry. I hope to eventually view it as an art form that ultimately is better misunderstood. While this irks me slightly, I am willing to allow my knowledge about poetry to grow into a state of true appreciation.

The Wild Wild West

So is it shocking that I am actually ENJOYING an english project? Wait, what? Yeah, I said enjoying. And honestly, that might be the first time that I have been able to say that about any english project...ever. Never before have I been actively engaged in the material that an english project has presented me (even though I picked the material myself). Nonetheless, I am certainly excited to be reading these three great books. So far, they haven't let me down. The Sisters Brothers was awesome. With its darkly funny dialogue and its ever-so violent backstory, I really was intruiged. It will definetly go down on my favorite book list. (I have a favorite book list?). True Grit has also been a very interesting story. With its classic Old West encounters and its gritty action, I am still intruiged. I hope it will go down on my favorite books list. In the future, I hope the same can be said for The Riders of the Purple Sage. I am really looking forward to it being my big finale for the final project. I hope it will round everything out and set me up to knockout the final project with ease, whatever that project may be!