This Wednesday began our second session of poetry recitations. During this class I heard a couple of very interesting poems from my classmates and presented three poems myself. Christian’s poem about the cab driver was written in a cool style. It allowed me to understand that poetry can be written in nearly any format. The content of the poem was about a “snapshot” of an unusual cab ride the author had experienced. The cabbie’s personality was more intricate than the author expected. This made me think about all the times I have wondered about the true identity or personality of bus drivers/cab drivers I encountered. Shumaila had a similar poem, in that it was also written as a snapshot of the author’s experience. The author was entertaining herself by thinking about alter egos that random people she saw may possess. I think its a lot of fun to use your imagination to think up a background story for someone or something you don’t know anything about.

I presented three poems to the class. The first was A Trip on the Staten Island Ferry. This poem was interesting and easy to understand; I enjoyed reading it. In my interpretation, the poem is a letter to a young person to cherish New York and the ferry, for it holds many wonders and mysteries that even the oldest souls have not discovered. Return of the Native was my second poem. This one was a bit more complex and difficult to capture in a performance. My reading led to everyone in the class individually saying “BangClash!” with some enthusiasm. The last poem I performed was called Time Shift, and I personally wrote this one. I figured since I had already wrote this poem, poetry recitations in class would be the perfect opportunity to share it. I read it with the expression I imagined it with, and that I had been practicing on the other poems. The class seemed to really like it, and I even got a lot of people coming to me personally to tell me they enjoyed it. Its an awesome feeling to put yourself out there and get some positive feedback. It was a very intrinsically rewarding experience.