week 9

This week in class we talked about aesthetics and what it actually means. Monday we split into different groups and was assigned a specific piece of writing, that we then had to present to the entire class what the underlying principles were, if we liked it and why or why not, and also what beauty meant to us, and if our writing showed an example of what beauty is. My group had Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, which was very easy to determine what underlying principles were used, like repetition, music, rhyming, etc. For the most part, every group said that there was no definition of beauty, because it differs from person to person, which I found very interesting.

During class on Wednesday, we did a fun activity where we got into a huge circle in the room, and read aloud the key points on how to workshop. We then took turns reading two different poems, "Halloween" and "Dia de los Muertos". After reading each poem, as a class, we discussed all the different things we noticed in the poem. I found it easier to workshop "Halloween" and also found that more interesting things were happening in the first poem than the second, mainly because I better understood it. "Dia de los Muertos" confused me a little, because some parts are written in Spanish. Currently, I am working on gathering all the information needed for my presentation tomorrow, and finding it a bit stressful! I have referring to an online journal, and feel as if I can't get enough information from it.

This week we certainly discussed a different culture in art when reading "Dia de los Muertos" by Sandra Cisneros. Although it was something different, to read a poem with both English and Spanish in it, it was rather difficult to understand. Like we discussed in class, I would have rather seen Sandra not use so much Spanish, that way the poem would have been more understandable for me to read. It was definitely a creative poem though! It actually inspired me to find a Spanish dictionary and figure out what certain lines meant, so that I could then relate it with the rest of the poem.