Thinking About My Poetry

Write a blog post in which you discuss how your thinking has changed about poetry in the last few weeks. What is the most important insight you have gained?

Poetry has always been really important to me. Writing that out feels cheesy, but it's true. My mom used to write poetry, which my grandfather used to bind into small books for her to look back on later, and she used to read me poems all the time when I was younger. I always thoroughly enjoyed poetry units in younger grades, so I was really looking forward to starting this year with something I could look forward to. 

This poetry unit has been very different so far, mostly because we're focusing less on technicalities/devices (like diction, rhyme, alliteration, etc) and more on the actual content of the poem and it's significance (to the author and the reader). I didn't know how to feel about this focus at first, since I don't usually think about how or what I'm writing when I write poetry, but I'm definitely starting to warm up to this approach. This isn't to say we're not focusing on form, because we are, but this is the most time I've spent thinking about poem content in a class before is all. The ideation exercises in the early chapters of Kowit's book (particularly chapters 2 and 3 ) were really helpful for me. Often times, I'd think about the prompt for way too long and end up with multiple ideas from the single prompt. I noticed many of the prompts felt... backwards, in a sense. Kowit would start by telling your 'okay, you're going to uncover some traumatic memories now' so you get into the headset of being mildly upset at your callbacks, and then you organize the memories by a secondary feeling (betrayal, disappointment, humiliation, etc, all found on pg 25). Ideation through prompts was much more helpful than I expected it to be, and I hope I remember to implement this more often in the future.