Lesson #4-
Aim: How can we use the poem, “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams as inspiration
for [our] own poems?
Class Discussion:
We started off class with a discussion on when we did something inappropriate but didn’t feel sorry for it, much to the amusement of us with siblings. A personal experience would be when my brother had ruined a 5-page essay I had been writing for several hours by accidently spilling water over it, so in order to retaliate I replaced the paprika in a dish he was making with chilli powder. Much to my amusement, he immediately ran for the milk and wondered if he had accidentally mistook the paprika with chili powder as I proceeded to insinuate that he was foolish for mistaking those two and making him blame himself for it. Ms. Peterson had likely done this as a leadway to “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, which focuses on a non apologetic husband who eats the plums his wife was saving for breakfast and is not truly apologetic for it.
The piece, “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, is a free verse poem that is a piece in the Imagist movement and shares those characteristics; instead of being a poem that focuses on ideas and can be quite vague, it focuses on physical objects and sharing a clear image to the reader while being concise. This helps us, as students, understand another form of poetry than the one we were more acquainted with.
We were then given some example poems to analyze.
| 1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting. 2 I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years. The man who asked for it was shabby and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold. 3 Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor! -Kenneth Koch |
Poem Challenge:
We were then supposed to create some poems using the previous poems as a format. I believe Ms.Peterson’s intention was to challenge us into finding the most amount of answers and to motivate us using team points. This would then help train us in a certain style of poetry.
The poems made by me team were the following:
I ate the ice cream in the freezer
Forgive me the cookie and cream was
So cold and delicious.
Forgive me I crashed your car
The joyride was fun
Forgive me I drank you coke
It was so sweet and bubbly
I spent your life savings
Forgive me
The chopsticks were worth it
We were then supposed to watch a four minute and twenty six second video on the use of imagery, which is what these types of poems attempt to focus on. Imagery is a device used by writers, and distinctively poets, that attempts to use the reader’s senses in order to capture the quality of an object or scene. It achieves this by being detailed and/or specific about what it is describing.
We were then shown some examples of imagery in poems, namely "Fast Break" by Edward Hirsch.
“A hook shot kisses the rim and
hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop,
and for once our gangly starting center
boxes out his man and times his jump
perfectly, gathering the orange leather
from the air like a cherished possession
and spinning around to throw a strike
to the outlet who is already shoveling
an underhand pass toward the other guard
scissoring past a flat-footed defender
who looks stunned and nailed to the floor
in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight
of a high, gliding dribble and a man
letting the play develop in front of him
in slow motion, almost exactly
like a coach’s drawing on the blackboard,
both forwards racing down the court
the way that forwards should, fanning out
and filling the lanes in tandem, moving
together as brothers passing the ball
between them without a dribble, without
a single bounce hitting the hardwood
until the guard finally lunges out
and commits to the wrong man
while the power-forward explodes past them
in a fury, taking the ball into the air
by himself now and laying it gently
against the glass for a lay-up,
but losing his balance in the process,
inexplicably falling, hitting the floor
with a wild, headlong motion
for the game he loved like a country
and swiveling back to see an orange blur
floating perfectly through the net.”
Group Work:
We were supposed to analyze this specific text and find literary devices as well as some examples of imagery. The reasoning for this is quite obvious, the use of these devices is quite necessary and important in poems, especially imagist poems.
For homework, we wrote a poem to whatever pastime we wanted. This would help us understand what we were writing about as it connects to us personally.
Lesson #5:
Aim: How has poetic expression evolved in the 21st century?
We began by discussing whether or no technology had a negative impact on literature as a group. The common consensus amongst our class was that yes, it did. The reading of literature was diminishing as other forms of media were being used that forced the user to write within a limit, notably social media. This is a segway to the use of micro poetry.
To better understand the use of micro poetry we had watched and read a few of Rupi Kaur’s interviews as well as her poems. We then saw how there are other examples of micropoems in things that aren’t always supposed to be poetic, such as songs.
Since the definition for “small” or “big” is always relative, we compared it to a longer type of poem, the epic poem, which is a poem that is of great length and has a narrative, similar to that of a novel. Examples of the types of poems include Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad ,and the Odyssey.
#Micropoem Challenge:
We were tasked with writing a poem that was brief and suited for social media. This helped us understand what the current movement of poetry was.
The icing covers the cake
Hiding many flaws
And their broken clauses too
Reflection: I believe this lesson has helped me a lot. I was better able to understand and use imagery as well as figurative language in my own poems. I also learned more about imaganist poems and drew inspiration from them. The micropoetry also taught me about how poetry has evolved in the current day as well as the current movement. I believe that I could have done a better job regarding using figurative language, however.
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