Week 3

This week we learned about creating vivid imagery through use of personification, synesthesia, apostrophe, comparison and lies. We then used all of these tools to write a poem in the style of our choice. In class we annotated a poem entitled "How to Fall in Love With Your Father". We read a number of poems in the MYOD anthology whose authors included William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stephens. Our homework for Monday is to annotate a poem using all of the new information we have available and write a poem in a similar style.

I enjoyed writing the first poem of this week. It was not terribly difficult to include all of the imagery tools in a single poem, especially because it could use any style we wanted. I was very happy with my poem, it made me laugh and came from an honest place. I'm not certain if it was critically "good" or not but it pleased me in the writing. Our Thursday assignment was more difficult. I enjoyed the annotation and found that once I got going the poem became more and more clear. I admit that I chose a poem that seemed straightforward but it was out of necessity and not laziness. I searched poets.org, reading poems on a variety of subjects and most of them just left me confused. However after annotation it seems that even a simple poem contains more than meets a first glance and to be successful a poem must actually be quite complex. I struggled with writing a poem in the same style. The more I understand the complexities and intricacies of style and imagery the less I feel capable of imitation. The tunnel becomes more and more narrow, the rules more defined.

In this instance I started to think about ethical issues when imitating a style. Does imitating a style mean writing on the same subject, using the same stressed or repeated sounds, or creating similar images? What is considered intellectual property in the case of poetry? How much is too much borrowing? I tried to write something that was definitely my own. I used the same syllables and end rhyme patterns, the same strength and weakness of metaphor at appropriate points in the poem, but did not immitate the subject of the poem, I thought that was too much borrowing.