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
Poetry in some way, shape or form, gives realistic ideas to even objects that reflect upon a part of life by using symbolism and personification.
In “Introduction to Poetry” Billy Collins, a professor, writes about the impatience of his students when analyzing a poem. He starts off by stating that they should enjoy the poetry and not worry about what the author is saying. By the twelfth line he shifts into describing his student’s frustration and the way they “torture” the poems. His use of metaphor, simile, and enjambment emphasize that one should take the time to really understand what a poem is saying while having fun instead of overanalyzing every single detail.
In order to appreciate a poem properly, care must be taken to analyze and understand many different facets of the work. Poems are often very complex and require a great deal of thought in order to arrive at the intended meaning. At the very least, three particular items of information must be uncovered during the reading of poetry. An experienced reader of poetry will always determine the identity of the speaker, the occasion of the speech, and the central idea of the poem.
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.
It is argued that poetry is boring, it is sometimes described as a useless topic that should burn in hell. But whoever thinks that haven’t seen the purpose of poetry. Poetry is believed the best medium to express emotions especially sorrow. Adversity is one of the hardest and sometimes the most sorrowful emotions that exist. This makes adversity the perfect topic of a poem. Poetry it is a compelling way for people to communicate about overcoming difficult life circumstances. I will use two poems to prove this, ‘The rose that grew from the concrete’ by Tupac Shakur and “The Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou.
Reflections Within is a non-traditional stanzaic poem made up of five stanzas containing thirty-four lines that do not form a specific metrical pattern. Rather it is supported by its thematic structure. Each of the five stanzas vary in the amount of lines that each contain. The first stanza is a sestet containing six lines. The same can be observed of the second stanza. The third stanza contains eight lines or an octave. Stanzas four and five are oddly in that their number of lines which are five and nine.
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.
Poets, and the poetry they write, are fundamental to the society in which they exist. The Modern poet is no exception. With words as weapons, the poet often challenges the very beliefs that underpin their civilisation and cause their fellow citizens to reflect on the status quo. It is the effectiveness of the literary devices the poet uses that often means the message is felt at a heart level, not just the head. An essay can give a dissertation on an important topic but it is the poet, using anything from personification to onomatopoeia, metaphor to assonance, that creates such
Emily Dickinson once said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry” (CITATION). To me Dickinson is saying that if something completely transforms her mind than she knows it poetry. I too have felt this way towards poems. If I am reading something and it stops me in my tracks I know it is very good poetry. What makes a poem stop me in my tracks when it transports me to a different place, evokes emotion from me, and moves me to the point of wanting to make a change. There are only a certain set of poems that have that ability, two of those being Tony Hoaglan’s poem Beauty and D.H Lawrence’s poem Piano. Both poems in their own way transport me to a different time in my life, evoke strong
In Steve Krugs, Dont Make Me Think, we learn how to use common sense to create a web site. The book lays bare the facts that users do not read the text in a web page and that user’s muddle through a web page, no matter how well we design the web site and it is our task to create a website which takes these two facts into account. The three statements I chose to write about are Billboard Design 101, Omit needless words and Usability as common courtesy. The reason I choose to write about these three is because it was these three subjects in the books which agreed the most with me when it comes to the design of a website. 1.1 Billboard Design 101
Poetry has never been an easy part of the English curriculum for me. I don’t know if it was because of my age or my teachers, but I feel like I never received a solid basic understanding of poetry in middle school. All my teachers since then have assumed that I understand poetic devices and the different terms used to analyze poetry. When I was handed the first sheet of poems in college, I was terrified. But the second paper I was given gave me hope. It was a list poetry terminology along with their definitions, something I hadn’t seen since middle school. While I still found it difficult to interpret the poems written by Mary Oliver, the class discussions after helped a lot. I found meanings in Oliver’s “Snails” and “Porcupine” that I had not seen before. I found these poems very easy to relate to. “Enemies of a House” by John Updike, however, was one poem I was able to relate to without the help of the class or the poetry terminology sheet. These three poems, “Enemies of a House”, “Snails”, and “Porcupine” were the easiest for me to comprehend and relate back to my own life and personal experiences.
Have you ever read poetry that can inspire you in your everyday life? Poetry that discusses the deep truth about our world and the people who wander it? Well, there is some poetry that can give you a better understanding about life,ourselves, and how to handle situations that come across our path. Inspiring you and motivating you to do your best. These types of poetries can really give the reader a deep knowledge about how to challenge the unknowns. Guiding you on how to work on your up and down moments. Poet Erin Hanson writes poetry that explains the cruel reality of life and also poetry that attracts all walks of people and their everyday challenges with life itself. This essay will present Erin Hanson's excellent poetry motivating many
This essay examines the effects that poetry has on society, both socially and politically. Poetry has been around for centuries, and it is a common misconception that it serves no purpose. One critic in particular, W.H Auden claimed, “poetry makes nothing happen”. However poetry awakens the reader’s eyes and gives an insight to the society in which we live in today, and which has been before us. As evident in Ezra Pound’s work, as he explored the use of imagism to critique modernism and twentieth century, forcing the readers to think more about society as a whole. The purpose of this essay is to show that poetry does make something happen and can have instrumental effects on society, whether it is a poet critiquing society, or simply providing another interpretation. Poetry is a code than needs to be cracked, it is a riddle that makes the reader bring out their true creativity, which is why I disagree with W.H Auden in saying, “poetry makes nothing happen.”
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
Q: In some poems what is described is given a meaning beyond the immediately obvious. Explore any one of the poems where this feature is most memorable.