Blogging Around

This week, I'm looking around at the most recent blog posts of my fellow classmates and posting my comments. These posts all discuss metacognition of writing our poems for English class. Here we go!

Leanne H. writes about receiving an A on her poem. She wonder why she got this grade when she has trouble seeing how it is a good poem. She also remarks on the homework struggles of us Academy students and others.

I commented:

"Leanne,

I have to say that, even if you don't think your poem is that great, I read it, and I like it a lot. I honestly wish that I could write poetry that well.

And I really do agree that so much of our lives our dominated by school, and therefore we can't just write, or read, or do much of anything "for fun." In fact, that's what I wrote my poem about. On the bright side, we have the blog where we can write a lot of what we want to say. That is, if we had the time. Unfortunately, I find myself constrained by time so much that many of the things I want to write, say, read, or do get thrown by the wayside.

I do hope, however, that you and I, and everyone else in our situation, can find time to write, read, think, and do the things we want. I still have hope that this time will come.

Bye for now,

Daniel"

Brandon I. wrote about his dislike for the poetry revision process. He compared revision to the tedious and annoying process of picking up your dog's feces while on a walk.  He worries that with each revision, he loses the uniqueness and personal voice of his poem that makes it his own.  Ultimately, he says he liked his original draft better than the final draft.

I commented:

"Brandon,

I tend to agree with you that revision can be annoying and end up ruining a work once thought of as your own. But I really do think that Mr. Allen's edits are meant to help us portray our emotions to our reader in the most effective way possible. Even if we think that our poem makes sense, to the reader who doesn't know very much about us, it could make little sense at all. That's what I found with my poem, and so Mr. Allen helped me to clarify the poem. The ultimate goal of this, as I see it, is to make our natural instincts and stream-of-consciousness writing more effective.

Having said that, however, I still see your point that poetry, a very personal and artistic form of writing, should be left to interpretation by the individual. And if Mr. Allen tells us to do certain things, that may just be making our poems more like his poems. So then our next teacher or editor might want something totally different, more along the lines of their poems. Something so stylistic can be hard to tamper with without eliminating the style.

I suppose the goal is to still be able to revise for things that don't make sense without taking too much out of the poem that it is no longer your own.

Best of luck,

Daniel"

Metacognition: Writing (and Editing) Poetry

This week I completed the second draft of my poem that was born about a month ago.  The original assignment was fairly broad - write a poem of at least 100 words using at least one type of figurative language.  Seems easy enough, I thought.  But when I actually sat down to begin the poem, I found myself erasing every line I wrote.  After a while, I decided to take a break until the next night.

And good thing I did, because the next day Mr. Allen explained ways to go about the now-seemingly daunting task of writing poetry.  He advised us to lower our standards and expectations: we cannot expect our first draft to be perfect.  Heck, no successful poet does.  So with that in mind, I went home and, instead of immediately sitting down at my computer and writing, I just went along with other homework I had.  Unfortunately, I got so caught up with my other homework that I neglected to get to the poem.  Fortunately, I still had a few more days.  

This pattern of involuntary avoidance of writing my poem continued until the night before it was due.  I began freaking out about doing the poem, knowing that we'd had plenty of time to do it.  The sickening feeling of procrastination set in on my stomach, and I lurched over to my desk to let my no-longer-connected-to-my-brain fingers get to work.  Sitting there steeping in self-loathing, I asked myself, "How did this happen?"  The first word that popped into my head became the topic of my poem: Homework.  And as soon as I chose my topic, my reconnected-with-my-brain fingers rapidly went to work.  

My poem turned out quite well, I thought.  So I came to school the next, poem in hand, happy to hand it to Mr. Allen, and rightfully so.  He seemed to like the figurative language and voice that I used, but wanted a little more specifics about the speaker and individual scene portrayed in the poem.  And this was my next predicament: How can I combine specifics and universal ideas to create a worthy poem?

So I took the poem home and began diligently working, noticing that I could indeed add specifics to the story without sacrificing the universal meanings of my message.  I didn't take anything out of what I already had, but rather added a couple new stanzas to form a more concrete story and speaker.  This worked well, I think.  I have yet to receive Mr. Allen's comments on this draft, but I hope he finds improvement.

I'll keep you posted.