Reflection Paper

A poet hopes that people would appreciate their poem in a way that it is not mistreating the work’s value. In the poem “Introduction to poetry” Billy Collins describes his desires on how students should connect with poems. Collins states that students try to force out meanings out of poems instead of diving in to understand its true nature. The author creates a sensitive yet aggressive tone to convey two ways of poetry appreciation through his use of diction, personification and metaphor.

My English Literature major has helped me to achieve an outstanding level of appreciation, enjoyment, and knowledge of both American and British Literature. As a high school AP English student, I struggled through great works like Hamlet and To the Lighthouse. My teacher’s daily lectures (there was no such thing as class discussion) taught me merely to interpret the works as critics had in the past. I did not enjoy the reading or writing process. As a freshman at Loras, I was enrolled in the Critical Writing: Poetry class. For the first time since grade school, my writing ability was praised and the sharing of my ideas was encouraged by an enthusiastic and nurturing professor. Despite the difficulty of poetry, I enjoyed reading it.

During sophomore year, we’d practice annotating, and analyzing poetry for inspirational purposes and to perfect our craft. Poetry is my

class. A few days passed and Mr. Toby mentioned to the class that since most of us didn’t hand in the poetry assignment

When I first thought about taking poetry writing the first thing that crossed my mind was when I took an intro poetry course at LaGuardia Community College. While the course was intriguing it was quite difficult because we had to break down every poem to discover the meaning. That meant paraphrasing the words into your own words without changing the meaning but also trying to understand exactly what is being said. I had always believed that this is an abstract idea; this course did not allow that. So when it was time to take poetry writing I avoided it until I could not anymore. However, as the course began I was pleasantly surprised at what I was able to learn these past seven weeks. One of the things that I was excited to discover was that

With that being said, I believe that any poet has the ability to educate or enlighten another person on otherwise overlooked parts of our society, and I believe that it’s beautiful but also frightening that poetry can almost be a more constructive factor to our youth than our news stations, schools, or churches.

Poetry is much more than just a piece of literature: it is a form of art. Similarly, it can save the world the same way art can, since the magic of poetry consists of many benefits. One of the major advantages of poetry is that one’s emotions and vulnerability is expressed in a beautiful way. All it takes is interest and to not have interest in poetry is

These poems over the last few weeks have really helped me destress and look over my life. Collins’s poem about the meaning and understanding of poetry itself. He wants students to enjoy poems when he says, “I want them to waterski, across the surface of a poem, waving at the author's name on the shore.” Poetry is part of life, that we might as well enjoy and get something out of it. Now my thought of poetry have evolved into something that bring freeing of unending joy. With finishing up this unit and have been contemplating taking a poem class in college next year, just for fun and cultural experience. Who knows this unit might have shaped the rest of my

Poetry has become one of my very close friends through my journey as a young person, it can become a close friends of many other students, if they are taught it. My peers and I have found it to be very useful in grappling fears and emotional experiences. One of my peers had

As Young argues, the point is not to critique students’ poems for poetic elements of form but to allow students to make a personal connection with the material and to construct meanings in a different way. The benefit of this approach across the curriculum, according to Author, is that students are challenged to think outside the box, which prevents cookie cutter approaches to learning, especially in the sciences where lab reports and essays are written according to a standard formula which over time becomes a mundane and predictable task.

Before reading this, I was less than thrilled to have to read a book full of poetry. Poetry is hard to relate to and hard to understand. It is typically very personal which makes it less enjoyable to read since it leaves

At the beginning of this course, I didn’t realize that my poems would be read aloud to the whole class and that other students would be given the opportunity to tear into them. So, when the line, “Nine years before Gucci - hold onto the pole”, from my poem “Carcajou Dreams” was read aloud, I quickly realized how silly my words sounded and that I was going to need to write poetry with a bit more substance. However, even though “Carcajou Dreams” wasn’t the best thing I wrote in the class, it still made people laugh, which made me want to write more. But I knew I needed to dive deeper into the craft of poetry and grow, so I attempted to explore more artistic topics when writing my next three poems, “Basque”, Homonym”, and “Y.” And as I continued writing, these poems taught me how to clean up my work and develop a specific tone.

As far back into my childhood as I can remember my grandmother was always the person who had read me stories and taken me to the library to check out books. I was a book nerd and all I wanted to do was read. I came across a book in my fifth grade class by Shel Silverstein and fell in love with his work after reading “The Land of the Happy" from Where the Sidewalk Ends. Curled up in the corner with a book used to be the only place you could find me. Poetry is my favorite form of writing because it is just so simple and short although it can hold so much meaning and feeling. One day my grandma took me to the library and I came across Shel Silverstein’s Falling Up poetry book. I took it home and found myself lost in his words. The next day, I hopped out of my grandpa’s truck and marched my little legs inside to check out all of the other books by him.

Over the course of the semester, I have been fortunate enough to work with a student who is having difficulties when it comes to reading. My student does not have difficulties when it comes to hearing a word, but rather when he sees a word. My student has definitely benefited from one on one work with me as well as the additional help he’s getting from the reading specialist during their WIN (what I need) time. My student does not like to read because he knows that he is struggling and he is embarrassed about it. When my student goes to his WIN time, he does really well because the instruction is at his level and there are only two other students who are also on the same level there as well. Besides the current intervention, programs I would recommend are Direct Instruction: Reading Mastery, Letter Spacing, Wilson Reading System and the Lindamood program (LiPS).

In my preparation for this essay I thought that there was going to be very little that I would learn about the elements of poetry. This is not because I am an expert and have nothing new to learn, but rather the opposite. I have never really spent the time to break down and appreciate poetry. One of the reasons I think that I haven’t spent the time on poetry is due to my reading habits. I usually read to gather information and poetry is on the other end of the spectrum. Fredrick Gruber sums this up, “Poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.” (Gruber) Having said all of this though, I did see a couple of things that I could apply to my own writing. I will first start off with some elements of poetry that I