Yesterday’s Seminar class really seemed to sum up the entire experience of reciting poetry.  The fears and questions we have all been grappling with over the past 2 weeks while reciting our poems were all laid to rest as the class discussed what it is like to have to get up and recite poetry in front of an audience.  When reciting poetry, the speaker has to step out of his or her comfort zone and become somebody else for the next 5 minutes.  The speaker has to take on a different personality, possibly one that is the very opposite of their own.  In addition, the speaker learns to read and say things differently, depending on tone, punctuation, and meaning.  What I’ve noticed during these poetry recitations is that each poem has a unique style and is meant to be read with different emphasis and tone.  I had never given this much thought before, but watching my classmates perform their poems and performing my own, coupled with Professor Kahan’s advice to each of us on how to make our poems more meaningful, made me see that each poem is like a person.  When I say “person”, I don’t mean that the poem takes on the personality of the poet; I mean that each poem has its own characteristics, its own interesting qualities, which contribute to the meaning and significance of the poem.  It’s interesting to think about.

As for yesterday’s poems, I really enjoyed listening to The New Colossus.  Stephanie read it with such fervor, she really made the message of the poem stand out.  To me, it seemed to take everything that America stands for and put it into words.  I think it was a very strong and powerful poem and it made me proud to be an American and also a New Yorker.

In looking back on all of these poems, I like how each poet was from New York and how each poem described a particular quality of New York in a different way.  It brought out the point that each person has their own opinion, their own point of view of the city.  It was also interesting to see how some poets took a minute quality, a small characteristic that people may or may not notice everyday and wrote an entire poem about it, shaping it, interpreting it in their own way, and thereby adding their own opinion of something that makes New York, New York.  I think that this was an interesting experience for all of us.  Not only did we have to confront the fear that most of us have of public speaking, but whether we were reading our own poems or listening to those of our classmates, we were hearing the words of New Yorkers who had come before us.  We are all New Yorkers and have our own opinions of the city already.  But listening to other people’s opinions may have allowed us to see different sides of New York, maybe ones that never would have crossed our minds otherwise.