Blog 1

I really enjoyed chapter one in Making Your Own Days. I've never been a big reader of poetry, and so have never thought about the poems I've written and how they will affect, draw in, or draw a picture for the reader. My concern for poetry has always been to express what is inside and if people understand it then that's fine, but if not that is fine as well. The passage about bring a horse into the room really drove that part home for me. It still confuses me in chapter two about when Koch is discussing the meter of a poem, and that certain syllables are stressed and that some aren't. It isn't that I don't understand what Koch is writing about, because I do, but I don't understand when I am reading a poem to pick out the stressed and unstressed parts.

The assignment due today of picking a poem marking it up and then mimicking the style in our own poems was a lot of fun for me, but also it was very challenging. I took what I thought to be the stressed and unstressed rhythm from a Hughes poem I found on Poets.org and tried to match it exactly while still writing something that made sense and followed the theme I was trying to create. Also I did my best to keep the same assonance/consonance rhyming scheme. I enjoyed the results very much, and at the same time feel awkward about writing something in the style of someone else.

Overall I'm excited about this class, and the opportunity to try new writing techniques and to get into some creative writing in college.