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Guess What I M Thinking Essay

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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.

Looking into the explorational work of a highly regarded New Zealand poet and scholar, Selina Tusitala-Marsh, we truly get an insight of someone who goes against the traditional conventions of poetry. Her collection of poems called Dark Sparring is about “…the journey of Marsh’s feelings about her mother’s death – wars declared, lists made, a “Mantra” written, even a printed Ransom Note. Other poems explain how Marsh took to Muay Thai kickboxing to cope with her grief following the death of her mother” (APA). Looking closely at the poem Ransom Note, it gives the effects of using an excessive number of

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