Post Seven: Poetry Reflection

I really don't like poetry so I wasn't very enthused going into this unit. I always find it boring and pointless. Poetry has never been something that comes to me very easily. It usually takes me a really long time to come up with ideas for a poem, and that always discourages me in making one. I surprisingly liked it better than I thought the unit better than I thought I would, once we started doing writing exercises.

 The most challenging part for me in this unit was analyzing poetry and song lyrics. I found those things hard to analyze because a lot of poems have a lot of meaning behind it and it's hard to get a good grasp on it. I love song lyrics that have a great meaning behind it but once I started actually reading the lyrics I stated to get confused, and wondered what the songs were really about.

 The assignment that was most effective on me was definitely the spoken word poetry. I didn't really know what spoken word was at the beginning. Learning about it was really interesting to me. It's a lot more open and has a lot less rules then other poetry. One thing that I did learn was that a spoken word has more impact if it has some sort of rhythm, but it doesn't have to rhyme. I also really liked how we weren't pressured into a topic. I was hesitant to present a spoken word in front of the class, but I wanted to challenge myself. Writing it was actually a lot easier than I thought. I picked a subject that I was really passionate and emotional about, so words just started to flow on the paper. The hardest part was presenting it. I did have my spoken word memorized when I was practicing by myself, but I was very nervous once I got in front of everyone. My paper began to be my comfort zone. I think if I practiced more I would have been a lot better, but I was definitely happy that I experienced it.

After this unit, I am now not as scared of poetry as I used to be. It made me more confident in my writing. I would still like to improve my writing and presenting skills, but I feel like I made a lot progress.