Final Project2

Assumptions Literary works- support
Big novels “The Glass Castle”
Fiction vs. Poetry Sonny’s Blues& cathedral vs. Alzheimer’s & How I love thee?
Drama Death of a Salesman

For my final project I would like to talk about how at the beginning of the semester getting through big novels was a big challenge for me. I am going to use my literacy circle book, “The Glass Castle” and talk about how I wasn’t sure how I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through this book when I started it but, I didn’t manage to get through it and really enjoyed it.

I also want to talk about how reading poetry for me has always been easier for me to read and understand where as reading some of the fiction pieces that we read this semester were a little challenging for me to get through. I want to use Sonny’s Blues or Cathedral for the challenging fiction pieces and the poetry pieces I want to use is Alzheimer’s or How I love thee?. Of those two poems I think I like the poem Alzheimer’s the best because it was easy to read and the author created a very clear picture for me of an older man coming back home and not really knowing where he was. I did think it was strange having this unknown person at the house. I really have discovered this semester that I like contemporary poetry rather then more traditional poetry.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about my first reaction when we got into reading the drama “Death of a Salesman” the other day. Even though looking at a Drama in particular “Death of a Salesman” at first glance can be overwhelming to me I think that reading it in class where I am not reading even but maybe a line here or there is much easier for me because if I am reading just a little here and their I can sit back and sort of think about what I just read or what someone else is reading. Reading long drama like this I have never really liked and I think after reading a little in this class my option about drama hasn’t really changed but I will say that reading them as a class does defiantly help.

Final Project

For my last project I would like to run with the idea of option #3, “Tell me a Story” or a literacy narrative. I would like to do this by writing you a letter. I am still working on the assumptions that I have seen changed over the course of the semester but, the one big assumption is being able to get through big novels without having that “How am I going to get through this?” feeling. I have also discovered while reading short stories and poems this semester that I really like contemporary pieces rather than traditional pieces. As for one more assumption my list has a blank. Can you give me a direction to maybe think about a little bit for one more assumption? For all of these assumptions think I am going to defiantly use the memoir “The Glass Castle” that I read for our class. As for a contemporary piece that I liked from this semester I have not come up with one yet but, plan to keep thinking and searching for one. Also when I find something to fill in the last blank for my third assumption I will find the perfect story to compare it too.

Sestina vs The Raven

After reading all the poems that we have read over the last couple of weeks I have discovered something about what I like and what I don’t like about poetry. I have discovered that modern day poems are easier to read and get through whereas the poems that are more traditional with language that is harder for me to understand doesn’t keep my attention as well and it seems to take me longer to get through poems and understand what I had just read. I would have to say of all the stories that I read for this blog entry I would have to say I liked the story “Sestina” the best. I think that is because it was written more modern and not traditional then the other ones. On the other end even though I read “The Raven” when I was in a high school English class I would have to say I still don’t fully get the back ground of what the story is about. What I think I did finally get out of that story was that it is about some who is in jail and is lonely and looking out in to the world with hopes of someone coming to visit them.

Love poems

When I started doing some research on the computer I discovered a website called http://www.gigglepoetry.com/. I thought that this website was able to offer lots of different options of poetry but I chose to look at the “Love” poems because I found that they had a lot of different themes but they also had different twists to make each poem their own. Even though I still don’t know what direction that I want to go with my second analysis paper I believe this website is going to be able to help me narrow my search and come up with the perfect paper in the end. At the moment I have Lovesick and I think you’re cute by Bruce Lansky, Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Pie, Oh my darling, Valentine and Today I got a Valentine by Kenn Nesbitt picked out. At first glance I picked these out for a couple of reasons. The first two poems started out different, but they both were about love and they ended the same way. The next three were about valentines but, again they were both written a little bit different. So, I can see all these poems have potential but, I seem to be a little lost as to how to go about writing this paper. I do hope that this coming week after reading some other classmates blogs and talking to some people I will feel better about writing this paper and by the end of this week be well on my way to writing that first draft.

Collection of my own poems

When I was a junior in High School the English class that I took we were required to write a book of poems. The two poems that I write myself and really like how they turned out, the first one was what my teacher called “the city poem” which I wrote about my home town of Mattawan. The other poem that I really liked that I wrote and I liked how it turned was one called Scars. Another one that I found in a poem book that I remember from my childhood was from the book “Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices the poem was called Fireflies. Because I liked all three of these poems from my own collection I decided to go out onto the internet and see if I can find any other poems that maybe written on the same topic or written in the same style and to my surprise I was able to find three poems that fit under one of these two category. One was called Snow Day that was written like my Mattawan poem, another poem about scars and finally one called Grasshoppers which was written in two verses and written by the same author as the Fireflies poem that I had found in my own book back in High School. I think I would have to say that of all six of the poems that I read I would have to say that I really like the two poems that I personally wrote from my own experiences and surroundings. I liked these to poems to such that I want to share them with everyone next class period and my hope is you will get as much out of the poem as I did when I was writing the poem.

"Marks"

Of all of the poems that I read for this blog entry I feel that the poem “Mark by Linda Pastan was a very well written and a creative poem. I couldn’t help but laugh my way through it. I thought that it was a very funny and creative topic to write about and because it was written this way it was not only funny to read it was also an easy read from start to finish. The one thing that I thought was creative was how the author expressed each family member’s opinion of how their mom took care of the housework and the family. The one thing that I thought would have added to the creativity of the piece would have been if the author would have continue with the idea of getting the rest of the families opinion on grading mom on her effects of running the house the husbands opinion and the children’s opinion were real but, in my opinion it would have been kind of fun if the author would have taken the story to the next level and asked other relatives their opinions (i.e. grandparents, aunts, uncles). In my opinion that would have given the story just that much more of a creative twist to the story as a whole.

Alzheimer's

A small brick house. A crazy old man stands in the doorway. When he gets back from the hospital he is trying to remember what it was like to live in his own house before he went into the hospital. Roses and columbine are already clawing at the mortar of one of the walls of this small house for a new owner to enjoy. Rhododendrons are also already planted in the back for a new owner to continue to enjoy. The sun is shining in the late afternoon in England after a good rain. A very special hot iron grillwork piece has its own placed outside. There is one problem with it, it has sparks flying off of it and causing the bushes and the rose bushes to burn. The house has white wood trim. There are sidewalks between the front room and the garage. He remembers a younger man in a tweed hat who loves music.
This story in my opinion was very well written even though it was a good story from beginning to end I didn’t really like how the author left her reader hanging. Who exactly is the woman who welcomes the crazy old man back into his house when he arrives home from the hospital?