Creative 6-1-12

Classes are done time to celebrate.
This is the last we will see of quarters.
All that's left are finals and graduation.
Now that awaits some, are semesters
The rest are going to start their jobs

Everyone's out tonight
Going to be out all night long
Dollar shots for the whole table
Take one and pass them down
Order another round
The last girls night of the year
Before we go our separate ways
Chicago, Columbus, Texas, Athens
Now there will be places to visit

Four years went by way to fast
These are going to be the ones
We'll remember. The friends we
Can't forget. So let's enjoy the night.
Taking pictures to hold our memories.
Laughing about all the good times
we had, and even the bad.

Critical 6-1-12

. Before this quarter I had never really written a poem so starting out I didn’t think I was going to be able to do a great job. As the quarter went on I actually was having fun with it. I seemed to do my best work after the due date and usually the ideas came while I was in my afternoon class on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s. While trying to revise some of my poems I had some difficulty because I couldn’t figure out where I wanted the poem to go. Then I just started fooling around with different lines and changing them and I think I have fixed them in a good way. I hope to continue writing poems and maybe fixing the ones I have already written even more.

Creative 5-25-12

Revised:

We’re driving along down the road

Heading to an early meeting

The GPS says wrong way, turn around

So we listen and end up with no more signal

We decide to continue on this way

Heading on a winding windy road

In the middle of no where

A shack, a run-down house

Are the only things we see,

We come across a small town

There is no one in sight, so we

Keep on heading down this winding road

Trying to find just where we needed to go

Another dreary empty town

It feels like we’ve been here before

Going in circles, with only a half hour past

It seems like much longer than that

Just when we were worried most

The signal updates and we realize

We’ve been heading in the right direction all along

No longer lost, we head on through

To the place we needed to be

A week later all over the news

A man killed by wild animals,

Who are no longer caged. All this happening

In the place where we just were

This gives our journey such an eerie feeling

What could have happened if it had been last week

It might have made the trip more worth telling

Instead this is the end and never will we go

Back through that town again

Original:
We were driving along down the road
Heading to the symposium
The GPS said wrong way turn around
So we did and ended up with no more signal
It's decided to continue on this way
We are heading down a windy road
In the middle of no where
A shack, a run down house
are the only things we see for miles
We come across a small town
There is no one in sight so we
Keep on heading down this windy road
Trying to find just where we need to be
Just then the GPS signal updates
We have been heading in the right direction after all
No longer lost we head on through
To Zanesville and find the place we needed to go

Critical 5-25-12

After the peer review in class the other day I got some good ideas on how I am going to structure the rest of my paper. I am going to continue to work on it day by day adding little bits whenever I think of a new idea to add to the paper. One of the poems that we just read by Anne Carson about memory and her father' dementia is actually going to work really well in my paper. So I will be rearranging my paper a little bit to be able to include this poem. I think it will work really well to bring my philosophy of poetry together. 

Criticial 5-18-12

Several of the poems we read all talk about memory. So for my final paper I want to focus on the topic of memory and the different types of memory portrayed in the poems we have read this quarter. In Virginia Woolf’s essay “From a Sketch of the Past”, it talks about a very early memory that she experienced. W.H. Auden writes about a specific day and the memory of how it felt on that day in his “September 1, 1939” poem. In Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”, she is talking about the memory of going with her aunt to the dentist. “Piano” by D.H. Lawrence was about how a women singing sparked a memory of his childhood with a piano.

Creative 5-18-12

One of the best memories I have
was when I marched down
Main Street of Disney World
People were cheering, cameras were flashing
My mom and dad were in the crowd
We were about to march and everyone was
In an amazing mood, having the time of our lives
In this once in a lifetime opportunity.
I remember feeling nervous and excited all at once
Here I was about to perform all the songs we had
Practiced the whole year at Football games
This was somehow different, the thousands
Of people that were waiting for us to come around
the corner and march and play the music right up in
front of the Magic Kingdom. 

Critical 5-7-12

In her book “Ka-Ching”, Denise Duhamel uses several different forms of poetry. She wrote a villanelle “Please don’t sit like a frog, sit like a queen”. The repeating lines in this poem were “remember to pamper, remember to preen”, “Don’t sit like a frog, sit like a queen”. Denise wrote this poem based on graffiti inside of a ladies’ bathroom. She did a pretty good job of making fun of what society thinks about women and attempting to show women to take pride in themselves. This poem proves to be limited because she has to rhyme everything with preen and queen. Some of the stanzas don’t quite go together and seem forced. “Smile, especially when you’re feeling mean. Keep your top down when you take your car for a whirl”, these lines have nothing to do with each other. The first line is basically saying bite your tongue if you’re angry and just put on a smile and the other is talking about when you are in your car going for a drive. Duhamel has also used the word ‘girl’ to rhyme all the middle lines of the stanzas. This is limiting her to certain words as well and I think when she used the line with whirl she was just trying for something to rhyme with girl.

Denise wrote a sestina about Sean Penn in her poem “Delta Flight 659”.  When I first read this I wouldn’t have understood why every line ended with ‘pen’ if it hadn’t been for her lines “maybe this should be in iambic pentameter rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in Penn”. These lines made the rest of the poem more understandable, in the sense of using Penn at the end of each line. A couple of her lines seem out of place in the theme of 9/11. Her line “poets who waddle toward your icy peninsula of glamour like so many menacing penguins” doesn’t seem to make sense. It seems like she is stretching it out just to be able to get the ‘pen’. The poem seems to be about the differences between her political beliefs and the political beliefs of Sean Penn.

Duhamel’s first 10 poems are all the same type, which are unlike any other in the book. They are more in paragraph form then in the shape of a typical poem. These stood out to me because they were uniquely written, sideways in the book. Every title is a dollar amount. Every single one of these poems talks about money in some shape or form. When I first saw that the titles were dollar amount and went up to the by 100,000 until they reached 1,000,000, I thought they were going to be stories told in a consecutive order. They seem almost random though. Each one talks about something different. This was a surprise to me, I am not sure why Denise did these poems this way other than the fact they all talk about money. I really liked her sentence in the $100,000 “there is a metaphor here somewhere, that making money can be messy and aggressive, that wimps like me will never truly take a hammer to a gift”. This sentence stuck out because some kids don’t want to break their piggy banks that they received as gifts but there are others who don’t care all they want is the money out of it.