week 15 "The Last Week!"

Wow, this is the last week of classes! I can not believe it is that time already, it feels like I was just writing the first paper we were assigned in this class! Definitely a great feeling though to know that all my hard work is about to pay off and I will get a break from school!!! YES!!!

Now to the poems this week, there was definitely a wide variety of poems this week. One of my favorite poems this week was “Variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams” by Kenneth Koch. This was the first poem that we have read so far that I have actually seen and understood a sense of humor in. It definitely made the poem easier read to read a little more fun to read. The first three stanzas of the poem are things that the poet apologizes for and that do not really matter or have a meaning to. However, in the last stanza, he still apologizes, but he has a cute reason why he did what he did.

Another few good poems are “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is a classic poem that I have heard before multiple times, it is kind of one of those poems that stick in your head and when you hear something that relates to it you instantly think of it. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” seems like a classic to me. It talks about what we as the readers are supposed to believe is Santa in his sleigh with his reindeer on Christmas Eve. He stops to enjoy the beautiful snow filling the woods, but does not have enough time for he has many stops to make before the night is over.

week 14 "Poems are better than Last Week"

4.24.2007

My favorite poem this week was “Sonnet” by Billy Collins. It was a very calm and soothing poem, and I understood very easily what the poet was trying to say. The poem explains what the sonnet form is and different examples of what a sonnet might be about. Even though “Sonnet” was my favorite poem, there were also poems that I liked this week because of their uniqueness. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas is a very touching poem and touches on several different points about a dying father who has many great qualities. Even though I really liked how everything in the poem “Sestina” is connected to tear drops and is very full of description; however, the last line of the poem gave it away for me, that last line of the poem dropped how great I thought it was and just confused it even more for me. “Ars Poetica” is also a very touching and inspirational poem, it shows what a poem should really be. The use of many metaphors allow the poem to take on multiple meanings and multiple possibilities depending on who is reading it and what they want to take from it.

Another poem that stood out a lot, probably because of how it is position in the book, is “Easter Wings”. I really liked how it was positioned sideways and it looks like wings, it really draws attention to the poem and gives it more meaning. One thing I noticed about the text itself is that the decreasing lines are sad parts of the poem, and the increasing lines of the poem are parts where the poet is praying to God and referring to happy moments.

One of the poems I would like to know a little bit more about is “When I consider how my light is spent”. I did not understand too much about this poem, just the fact that the question after the poem asks if we would feel differently if we knew the poet was blind. The more I thought about that question the more I realized that the main points throughout the poem were images and landscapes being described, so yes, that would change how I feel about the poem.

week 13 "Many Confusing Poems"

4.17.2007

This week’s poems were very interesting; I am not quite sure what to think of them. Out of all the poem’s, the one that I understood the most would have been “Marks” by Linda Pastan. The poem was short and too the point without all the other filler words throughout the poem confusing the reader. The last few lines of the poem were a little depressing however, “Wait til they learn I’m dropping out.” Throughout the poem, she was given decent remarks and still she is not happy with herself, no one can be perfect, yet she thinks nothing but perfect is acceptable to her.

Many of the poems I read this week I had trouble interpreting and understanding. “The Red Wheelbarrow” was a very short poem, and was very hard to understand the point they were trying to make because there was not enough information in the poem. With the poem “This is Just to Say,” the poem was very interesting, but I keep thinking that the poem is being used as a metaphor for something larger and a little more serious. “Pied Beauty” used a lot of colors and comparisons, however nothing really tied together for me in the poem to make it understandable in the end. “Better My Heart, Three-Personed God” is a very confusing poem, I still don’t understand what the poet is trying to say. Is he trying to say that he loves this person or that he wants to be divorced? The poem goes back and forth between good and bad and is very hard to understand which is the true feeling.

“Sound and Sense” was probably the most confusing poem this week. I understand that it is about criticism, and that it focuses on the problems of literary criticism. I read this poem over and over trying to get more out of it, but each time I got more and more confused.

"Poem on a Painting"

4.13.2007

This week has been a nice week not having to deal with reading any poems while working on our poem project and finding a painting that we will be able to do our poem project on. At first when I heard that our project was to write a poem based on a painting I was stunned and shocked, the first thing that popped into my head was “I have no idea how to write a poem”. After looking at different poems I realized that my first step would obviously be to pick a painting that I was interested, which I have, think of a topic or theme of the painting, which I have, and then start writing down words or a story based on that theme. Those seem to be the easiest parts. What I still have to do is arrange the poem in the form I need and make sure everything still flows and is easily readable.

Overall, this project seems to be a little bit easier than the last two, the hard part will just be making it sound professional and not so much like an 8^th grader threw it together. That is the part that will take the most time and effort to finish it off and polish it up.

Week 11 "Easter Break"

4.4.2007

This week has been very tight and busy with it being a short week because I also want to get most of my homework done before the break for a stress free weekend. The poems were definitely an interesting start to the week since I was not quite sure what to expect. I was really excited to start reading shorter poems rather than the longer stories, but when I read the first poem I was really worried because I didn’t understand the first poem as much as I had wanted to. After reading the first poem, I did a little bit of research so I could understand it better. The second poem I read got a little better, and then the third even more, and so on. I just had to get used to the kind of poems I was going to be reading.

My favorite poem this week was “To a Daughter Leaving Home.” This poem was easy to read, and flashbacked to the happy memories of childhood. This poem did not jump around here to there and so forth, but they stayed on one track and explained it clearly and understandably.

A few more poems that I found interesting and enjoyable included “Daystar”, “Dover Beach”, and “Morning”. The rest of the poems were either to long and confusing or too hard to understand what was being talked about throughout the poem.

"Finished with project #2"

3.28.2007

Finishing my creative project has never felt better! Overall, the creative project was a very big task, but also fun at the same time. I did my creative project on the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The task of completing the whole project was what made me work so hard at it. I was very worried at the beginning when I had first started the project that I was not going to be able to get it done on time, but I worked really hard and was surprised that I didn’t only get it done on time, but I also got it done early! The hardest part of the project was coming up with the right amount of scenes to tell the story sufficiently, but not add more scenes than needed to make the story even more confusing.

The best part for me was not having to study for anything and just being able to by myself and be creative. Once I had the scenes picked out, I was able to focus on how I was going to portray each scene in my “comic book”. In order to get the overall idea oh how I wanted to lay out my comic book to begin with, I went to Barnes & Noble to buy a few little comic books and looked through them for a layout idea.

All-in-all, I really enjoyed this project better than the first one, just because it was more like an actual project and not a paper. The paper went well, but the project went even better. It just depends whether you prefer tests and papers to projects, it varies greatly on if you are the creative type or not.

"On My Way with Project #2"

3.20.2007

Project #2……definitely going a lot better than I had originally anticipated. I am a graphic design major, and have decided to take the graphic fiction route on this project. The dialogue scene was the project that did not interest me or spark any thoughts. Even though I am not the best drawer on the computer, I am using Adobe Illustrator to work on my Graphic Fiction/comic book on the story I chose, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. So far, I am almost half way done with my graphic fiction, as I started working on it a few days ago, and have been trying to go full strength on it ever since. I like how creative I get to be, however, I am a little unhappy on how hard it is to draw people on the computer; so hopefully what I have accomplished as far as drawing people on the computer is good enough. To me, the people look like five year olds drew them, but at least I try and the project is not actually graded on how well we can draw figures on our computer.

It is very nice to have a break from the long stories, and I am glad that we are going to have some “short and sweet” poems to read coming up in the next couple of weeks. Out of the two longer stories we have read these past couple of weeks, The Doll House and Death of a Salesman, my favorite one to read was The Doll House. The Doll House is more my kind of story. I like the fact that there were a lot of somewhat happy scenes in The Doll House and most of The Death of A Salesman was very depressing. Even though the ending to The Doll House was not very happy either, the story flowed much better and had more meaning to me.