Week 1

In the first week of readings from MYOD, the first chapter discussed the basics, or the history and construction of poetry. A few highlights from the chapter include the way that the words are talked about and how they are used differently in the basic form of writing and the way words are used in poetry. As we see from the chapter, words can be used much more diversely in poetry than they can in the written and spoken English language. Moving from this idea, chapter two talks more about the music of poetry, with the line breaks and rhythm.

The first two chapters in MYOD were definitely helpful for me to understand poetry a little more, since I have not had much past experience in writing or discussing poetry in this amount of depth. The second chapter on music definitely sparked my interest and made me think about poetry in a different way. It was interesting to focus on this idea of how words in the English language have their basic use, but when writing poetry, words can be placed in many different ways and orders that are not possible in our everyday speech. These ideas were particularly useful and interesting while working on the poems we wrote relating to this idea of music in poetry. I did find these assignments more difficult than I may have thought because of my lack of experience in writing poetry. I did find it hard at times to make the poetry sound musical, as the poems I read did a very good job of that.

I think the main thing I have learned this week is to not shy away from using words in a different and sometimes uncomfortable way when writing poetry. I think for me it will be more of a challenge to use the words we use everyday in this new form, but I think reviewing different poems that do this and doing some of the in-class exercises were useful in demonstrating how I can start to create a more rhythmical way of speech. Although the construction may still be difficult for me, I think after this week, I am beginning to understand more of the process in writing poetry.