Week One Blog

Chapter one of Making Your Own Days really focuses on poetry as a whole and expands on what exactly poetry is. From being music as it is written to a party (although, notably only in regards to the pleasure part), poetry is given a far more broad definition. One of the things that really stuck out to me was the idea that it is a second language. “Music” on the other hand, focused more on what makes a poem what it is. It covered rhyming and repetition, the use of stanzas, and really empathized the idea of sound in poetry.

I was a little surprised by Making Your Own Ways, but in a good way. The first chapter included a lot of little snippets of poems that sounded wonderful, and I'll have to check them out, especially The Tempest. One of the most important things to me though, at least in chapter one, was the second language that poetry is. I didn't realize it until Koch mentioned it in such detail, but it is true! In poetry, so many things become possible and we as writers are able to make sense of different word combinations that just wouldn't be possible in any other art form.

On the note of poetry, Koch talks about how it is always changing. Even when trying to define poetry-sometimes as music, sometimes as a party-the definition was always changing. I think it was a good thread to consider for the next chapter, titled “Music”, considering how he focused on the many changes poetry underwent throughout history. Poetry, like all forms of art, is an ever changing and ever growing life, so it only makes sense that even Koch would have an ever changing definition of what poetry really is.

One of the things most interesting about it all, in chapter two “Music” was the way Koch drew the lines between the old and modern ways of poetry. How one would hold on to traditional means of writing it, while the more modern seemed bent on breaking the 'rules' of the art form and creating new kinds of poetry, or rather music, and pushing themselves as far away from their more traditional counterparts as possible. However, despite this, the modernists have their roots in the traditional ways, despite all they do to reform poetry. And eventually, even those modernists will become the traditional, as time goes on. It makes me wonder what's to come-hundreds of years from now, when our own forms of writing are considered 'traditional.'