I Believe Alexander

What is poetry? Is poetry about your feelings? Is poetry meant for you to deliberate or read between the lines? Elizabeth Alexander, a black educator that teaches poetry, believes that poetry is where you are your true self and finding yourself. In 2005, she published one of her poems called “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe.” She constructed the poem to speak to her students about her meaning of poetry. Poetry causes various emotions, various content, and based on various forms of realities.

INTRODUCTION – (1 paragraph) STRUCTURE 1. Opening sentences which introduce the poem, its author and its form.Explain why the poem is of a particular form (either a ballad or lyric poem). 2. Thesis statement: A general statement about what the poem communicates about life and life experience. 3. Signpost: briefly outline the more specific reasons for how/why the poem conveys this life experience and / or message. (Introduce the main features which will be explored in more detail in the body of your essay).

In conclusion, the poem points the inevitable cycle of natural and emotional events and the power that love has to go beyond that cycle. This is why the speaker assures that the way he has loved is something that

“Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims is an excellent of example of an author using many types of literary terms to emphasize his theme of a love that is imperfect yet filled with acceptance. In, this poem Nims uses assonance, metaphor, and imagery to support his theme of “Imperfect, yet realistic love”.

Readers are aware of this ambiguity. Here the heaviest flashback thoughts and the short-lasting issue set up a continuing contrast throughout the poem, which enchants its effect.

Poetry, what first comes to mind? If your anything like me, poetry can seem somewhat monotonous, rather like a locked door exclusive, complicated, and hard to understand. I think poetry tends to be a big game of “Guess what I’m thinking!” and I hate that game. I’m not a mind-reader. I think a lot of people who get excited about poetry are really pretentious. This possibly comes from believing that they actually can guess what other people are thinking. When we think poetry, we tend to know poetry by it’s traditional forms of having sonnets, ballads, often rhyming (but not always) and they tend to have a specific and symmetrical structure (APA). Throughout this essay I wanted to consider poetry through different explorations and how subverting the traditional conventions of poetry might be an effective way of engagement or in an opposing way of demotivating the reader.

symbolic richness, but at the same time the poem supplies the reader with a wide

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

This will help us understand the complexity and richness of this massive poem. In the explanation following, it will first be demonstrated that

poem is not merely a static, decorative creation, but that it is an act of communication between the poet and

In the articles they wrote, they talk about what they think the poem is about. Both Lentricchia and Richardson pull out pieces from the poem and explain their thoughts and opinions. Lentricchia believes the poem shows self reliance, Richardson views the poem as “step-careless”,

Alexander’s primary idea is that poetry pertains to the individual. She states this explicitly within the first couplet, and then further explains her point through an abundant use of metaphors. The body of the poem consists entirely of metaphors, all with a similar message: poems have hidden meanings, all unique to both reader and writer. Alexander conveys this concept best in line eight, “emptying the proverbial pocketbook.”

Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than

The poem is divided into two stanzas which makes the structure obvious to the theme. In the first stanza, it

Great poetry is great not because of what it says but because of how it