My Recent Experience Writing Poetry
I have ventured into exploring the subject of poetry both as a student who analyzed and explicated published poems by established authors, and as a writer who explored my own creative writing skills through my understanding of poetic devices and forms. In the process I have noticed similarities and differences between the development of my own poetry and writing about poetry such as the simple fact that I do not think that it would be possible to create formal poetry without having at least a minimal understanding of components that a poem consists of. The same goes for writing about poetry, that is you can not confidently analyze or explicate a poem without at least having a general understanding of some poetic devices and an idea of the different types of poetic formats. I felt that writing about poetry had a big influence on my own poetry. It felt like it added an arsenal of poetic devices that I was otherwise oblivious to. This allowed me to be a little more creative in my poems by utilizing rhyme and assonance in my writings. Reading poems by fundamental and established poets gave me prime examples of poetry and its rules. These poems influenced the structure and tone of my writing. When I have a classroom of my own I will replicate a similar assignment for my students. I felt that learning about the performance aspect of poetry is extremely beneficial to students. It helped me as a college student build more confidence in my writing and within myself in general; I could just imagine the positive impact it could have on an adolescent.
Hello, Gerardo! I agree that composing poetry cannot be successfully done unless one is already familiar with the various poetic devices available to them. While poetry does not necessarily need to have hard and fast rules applied to it, these devices do indeed enhance the way the poem is received by the audiences. Repetition, rhyme, rhythm, allegory, metaphor, simile-- each of these devices elevate poetry from simple words on a page to an art form. I also agree that the knowledge of these poetic devices enabled me to be more creative with my poem. It was almost something of an exciting challenge, attempting to figure out how to craft this poem in a way that utilized the devices effectively, and how said devices would impact the audience when performed. Writing my own poetry is definitely a practice that I would happily repeat again, and I am glad that you too received the same sense of enjoyment from this exercise. - Kiara F.
ReplyDeleteHi Gerardo, I really wanted to tell you that your poem was amazing. Thank you! Moving onto your post about poetry, I liked how you mentioned the similarities and differences between the development of your own poetry. Another great thing you highlighted in your post is the importance of understanding the different poetic components to both write and analyze poetry confidently. I am glad to hear that you writing about poetry had a big influence on your own poetry and that it helped you expand your creative range. I think it is amazing how analyzing poetry can spark other people’s own writing and I think your reflection captures exactly that! Lastly, I think it is a great idea to replicate a similar assignment for your future students! It will allow them to express themselves earlier on in their life and benefit them in the long run. It is important for individuals to have some sort of outlet that they can turn to so that they can release whatever they are feeling and not keep it bottled up.
ReplyDelete- Stella Chun
Hi, Gerardo! The topic of figuring out how to teach the creative act of poetry to students is a challenging one. Fortunately, some young people are already driven to write poetry. I also was writing poetry before actually studying it. In high school, I wrote about three or four poems, and that was it until later as an adult, when I took a creative writing class, and after the poetry writing sessions, I “became” a poet, and was writing poetry practically daily for a few years.
ReplyDeleteI think that writing poetry first without much understanding except counting syllables was pretty wonderful because it was completely natural poetry writing from whatever was in my head. You are right, however, about learning about poetic analysis, structure, and characteristics of different kinds of poetry is so important to advancing one’s skills, and eventually to help others learn how to write poetry.
I wrote in my post that the use of prompts is really important, especially when inspiration is on pause. However, the use of prompts, such as replicating or using similar poetry prompts that we used in our class is a great way to get students to write a poem for you future classes. There are lots of prompts available on the poetry web sites, such as poets.org or poetryfoundation.com.