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?

Poetry

I thought that each one of these poems had something that was different and unique about each one of them. I thought that the first one “How do I love thee?” was very repetitive. I thought that it stopped kind of abruptly at the end. On the other hand I really liked that second story “The Tally Stick” was very descriptive, this in my opinion made the story really good. These are the two stories that stuck out in my eye as the best of the ones that we read this week. The other ones on the list in my opinion just didn’t to anything for me or they were kind of hard for me to follow. The one that I thought was hard to follow was, “On her loving two equally”. I had a hard time keeping the people straight, the wording was confusing and the overall way the poem was printed in my opinion just did not work for me for some reason. Another story that I liked was “Wedding-Ring” it was touching but, in my opinion again the format was kind of crazy. Why, would a writer write a poem with most of the lines on the left margin and then after four or five lines all of the sudden change margins and then go back after just a couple of words? I didn’t see the purpose to that at all.