Last week in class, my classmates, and I recited poetry. Each of us was given poems, at random. We had to find facts about the poet’s life, and other significant works the poet may have written. My poet’s name was Laurie Sheck, and the name of the poem I had to recite was called “The Subway Platform”. This particular poem was about the hard work it takes to get where you want to go, but when you get there all that hard work was worth it. I felt as if every poem had a similar theme, about perseverance. There was a poem by Langston Hughes in which many of the poems he writes are about perseverance. There was also one about racial stereotypes, and how to get through the embarrassment of being stereotyped. Even the poem I read was about persevering through the bad times, until the bad times payoff.
Category: 7 December
Poetry Reading
This past Wednesday, I had the opportunity to listen to about 14 poems from famous poets, all from the New York area. Each poem was assigned randomly to the students, which I felt gave the class more opportunity to reach outside their normal comfort zone. Not only did we have to recite the poem but we also had to research the author, as well as state our opinion and thoughts on the meaning of said poem. This allowed not only myself, but also many of my classmates, to better understand the thought process behind the poem. The poem I had, So Many Lives by John Ashbery, was quite a handful due to the abstract thought and non-specific subject. I determined from my reading that So Many Lives was about a person realization that their partner is only with them for financial security, not out of love. The poem may also be about the way some can not leave their significant other, no matter the terrible things that person has done. Ashbery truly displays this ” no matter what we are together” attitude when he says, “I can walk away from you, Because I know I can always call, and in the end we will, Be irresolutely joined.” I learned a lot about the author that I may not have known otherwise, such as that he has won a pulitzer prize for his work on a collection of poems known as, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I also enjoyed others reciting as well, and found that many of the authors had vastly different stories/backgrounds, but still were able to craft beautiful pieces of poetry.
Poetry Readings
The class had to recite poetry in order to show the different styles of writing the poems (where the pauses are, where to speed up and slow down, the tone of voice, etc.). I found this interesting because reading the poem in your heads is very different from reading it out loud. Reading a poem out loud reveals the decisions of the poet and the hidden meanings. Alliteration is “the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.” Reading the poem out loud helps the audience hear the alliteration and gain a more analytical view of the poem. My poem was about the point of view of the upper and lower class during the Great Depression. I did not realize this at first, but I knew there was a reason I read the two poems together. Like photography in an art show, poems “speak” to each other. The first poem I read expressed the desperation of a newly widowed mother trying to move on from her husband’s death. The lower class was at a very vulnerable state of mind, and this poem expresses the despair and desperation. The second poem was completely different. It expressed the lighthearted tone of the upper class. The two poems speak to each other in ways other than tone too. The first poem depicted a wife who received the news that her husband died, while the second poem depicted a young couple giddy with love and carefree. I personally enjoyed the poetry readings and I cannot wait to see the video projects.
Poetry Blog
Before we read our poems, we listened to Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. This poetry reading showed that the actual recitation of the words is a huge part of the meaning of the poem. Since the lines “He gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake” are read faster than the next two lines of the stanza, the poem receives an emphasis that would not have happened otherwise. This shows that vocal variation and meter are two essential parts of any poem. The poem that I had to read was written by Langston Hughes, an African-American poet who wrote at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. His poem was all about unrest, unease, and impatience that African-Americans all felt during that time. When I first read the poem I thought I couldn’t connect at all because I obviously don’t personally undergo the same type of problems that African-Americans did. However, I did feel a connection between his poem, and themes from the art exhibit, “Can a Line Define?” The same impatience, unease, and unrest that he felt, is probably very similar to that of a Syrian Refugee. They both have a theme of a lack of acceptance, simply because of a culture difference. Both sides want respect in an unaccepting world. Langston Hughes captures something very similar to this. Listening to other classmates recite poetry was both entertaining and educating. Exploring the various themes of each poem and poet made this class one of the most enjoyable.
Poetry Readings
Before reading our poems, we read Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. I love Robert Frosts poems because I’ve had a lot of fun reading them in high school. However in my high school class we never actually heard Frost read one of his poems, so I thought that was cool hearing his voice and how the poem was meant to be read.
I enjoyed the variety of poems that everyone read. I liked the ones about love because I though they were sweet. I do think my own poem, “Robinson Walks Museum Mile” by Kathleen Rooney, was my favorite because I was able to read it multiple times. Although some poems are meant to simply be heard and enjoyed. I find reading them thoroughly and analyzing the use of different literary devices to be more interesting. To really understand a poem it must be read multiple times. After reading my poem multiple times, every time I noticed something new that was meant to be obscure about it. For example, I was always taught that the speaker of poem is its own character unless it is specified to be the author or another character. However Professor Kahan pointed out that the speaker of the poem was Robinson. This was interesting because I felt that the fact of Robinson talking about himself in first and third person added to the character’s obscurity and the obscurity of the poem.
Poetry Readings 12/7
This past week we were all assigned poems to read in class. I thought this was going to be a bit like the picture assignments, a bit drawn out and repetitious. Fortunately though, I think, that this assignment was quite the opposite. It was something that was fun to listen to, and enjoy. I think that what made it different from the picture presentation was the fact that, even though they were all poems, they each had their own emotion and story to each of them which gave a reason to be drawn in to each individual one.
For myself I was actually glad to get the poem that I did. At first I did not realize it, but after I read it over a few times I was able to draw a connection to it. My poem represented the idea of “saving face” and “putting up a facade”, and how there is more to a person that what just meets the eye. And on a personal level I was able to connect to this because I know the same feeling. Of seeing someone for the first time and once you start talking to them you think differently about them when compared to what you assumed just by appearance.
Poetry
Last week we all read poetry in front of the class. I thought this was a little boring because a lot of the people did not know how to read the poems with the correct pauses, making the poems sound like essays instead of poems. I really enjoyed my poem because I did feel like I had a connection. The author talks about how the streets were once believed to be poisonous with gas and sewage, and then now it looked fine. My mom was raised near the mall and it used to smell disgusting because of the fumes. She was also afraid that she would get radiation and was afraid to have me and my sisters go near it. Now, the dump is covered and they are going to build a park on top of it. I feel that my mom feels the same way as the author.
Poetry Readings
Last week everyone read their assigned poems to the class. I thought this was going to be boring and last a long time, but it actually went by pretty quickly. Before starting the readings, we watched a video of Robert Frost reading his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I thought this was beneficial because it provided an example of how poetry is supposed to be read. Then we moved on to the poetry readings. Everyone’s poems were pretty short so even though there were a lot of them, it didn’t feel like it lasted very long. Everyone gave a brief biography about their authors before reading their poems, which made the poems more interesting because we got to see how the work related to the authors life. It was also interesting to hear everyone’s interpretation of that poem and to see how that interpretation contrasted with my own.
Blog #11- Poetry
This week’s seminar class involved reciting poems that were assigned to us, all based on various topics, mainly about New York City. I was never good at public speech, and would often get very nervous talking to a bunch of people. However, this time I wasn’t as frightened to recite my poem and actually wanted to get it over with as soon as I could. The poem that I was assigned was called Baseball by Gail Mazur. I had to give a short little introduction about the author,and what I think that the poem means to me. I only had about three sentences about what the author did and accomplished, while others had much more to say on the topic. I thought, that everyone who read their poems did a good job, especially deciphering the poems meaning. In the beginning of class, Dr. Kahan showed a video of Robert Frost reading his poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Looking at the author reading his poem is beneficial to understanding the poem, since the author knows the overall meaning and tone of how it should flow. This is what I did to better understand my poem. I found a helpful video of Gail Mazur reading her poem, and this helped me to recite the poem as close as she would’ve when reciting it herself. Overall, I thought that it was very fun hearing everyone read their poems, and I thought that everyone did a good job.
Poetry Class
Last week in Dr. Kahan’s class, we all recited the poems that we had been assigned several weeks ago. Before we did that, we watched a video of Robert Frost reciting one of his most famous poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. I had actually never seen a picture or a video of him, so it was pretty nice to finally put a face to the name. I thought it was useful to notice how he had enunciated every word clearly, and also varied the tempo at appropriate times in the poem.
After watching that video, each of us took turns reciting our poems. I thought it was going to be difficult to sit through 20 presentations, but it wasn’t as hard as I thought. Most of the poems were pretty interesting, each focusing on a slightly different issue with all of them coming back to the central theme of New York City. The short biographies presented at the beginning of each poem also made listening to the poems more interesting, knowing the backstory behind their author. Overall, I thought everyone did a good job, given that we might not have a lot of experience with public speaking.