Tuesday 23 April 2013

Poetry - Yay or Nay?

Wow.... I've stopped blogging for MUCH longer than I thought. Well, so much for my bold anticipation of regularly blogging. It seems that whenever I have free time, I completely forget about writing and decide to experiment with an iPad or some sort of other gadget instead. That's not good.

Anyways, now that I'm blogging after some time, I think that I should write about something relating to English, literature, the 'essence of English' and things like that. So today I've decided to write about poetry. Specifically, my thoughts on the new poetry unit that we're starting in English class. We started the unit just yesterday, and it seems already that we're more knowledgeable about the new topic. Honestly, though, we should be. Most of us who were educated in some sort of an international school should have been studying poetry since 5th grade! I mean, schools these days really seem to love the topic. It almost seems as though they want to foster an entire school of Shakespeares! That's not to say, however, that I don't like the topic. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I love poetry, though I'm not great at it. Yesterday, when we had our first discussion in class, we tried to get down to the essence of what poetry is and what makes poetry, um.. poetry. It turned out that this was a lot more difficult than what I thought it would be, for myself as well. We had to really get down to the differences between structured writing, known as prose and poetry. Really, the main idea, or 'enduring understanding' as they say at my school, that I took away from yesterday's talk was that poetry is writing almost without structure, a piece of writing that it trying to hint ideas at you rather than directly stating it. 

Now, on to my thoughts on poetry. Well, I personally love reading poetry, because I can't help but admire the amazing use of language in poetry, even if it is coming from an amateurish writer. Poetry is like that. No matter how good or bad you are at English, it almost makes no difference to your writing. In poetry, you convey emotions and scenes in seemingly never ending stanzas, so you can just write and write and write. You can hint ideas or thoughts with emotions and other writing tools. It can also be said that reading poetry makes you feel more relaxed and sometimes in better spirits, even if the poem is about something dark or horrifying. Poetry can be appreciated from all angles. Yet, I sometimes find it tedious to write poetry. Often this is so when I'm given a topic and have to write about it. To me, poetry is meant to be free, it is meant to express yourself as you feel at that moment. Your poem will have more impact if you write with the natural emotions that you are feeling at the moment. So, basically, I'm quite excited about the poetry unit, but I hope we won't have to write too many poems based on topics given to us by the teachers.

In today's English lesson, we basically learnt about the parts of a poem and what 'economy of verse' meant. Although it sounds fancy, 'economy of verse' is simply the careful use of language in order to convey a message. That being said, economy of verse does get a bit complicated once you go deeper into it. You can have good economy of verse but lack detail, have bad economy of verse but good detail, etc. One of the activities we did today involved reconstructing a deconstructed poem. This was a pretty interesting exercise because it really showed us how we viewed poetry, and how the different components of a poem came together. Most of all, it showed us what we perceived poetry to be. 

So, before I finish this post, I think it would be a good idea if I show something poetic, you know, to give this post a good effect. 

'The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.''

Okay, so I'm not quite sure what it means yet, but I'll figure it out soon. This one's from William Wordsworth, so that explains a few things.