One of the activities we did this week was writing a poem or story based off of a photograph. I had actually done this before, but the example we read by Jeffery Bean was quite a bit different from the way I've always thought about that kind of activity. Bean's was very much going through the different elements in the picture and including all of them in his poem in different ways, whereas mine was more about taking inspiration from a picture and running wild with it. That isn't to say that Bean's poem didn't add anything, it still morphed the picture into a strong poem that extends beyond the picture, but to show what I mean, I'll share the picture I wrote from and how I wrote about it:
0 Comments
After reading and discussing the poem "My Papa's Waltz" with the class on Monday, I was struck to discover that I had a completely different interpretation of the tone of the poem as most of the rest of the class. I thought it was an innocent poem about how we can remember the good parts of our experiences, even when there are problems we cause. The others seemed to think it was a dark poem about an abused child who was too helpless to do anything about it. At first I thought that I had simply read the poem wrong, and upon another reading I could see where everyone was coming from. Then, when we talked about it again on Wednesday, the attitude of the class flipped again. Now, everyone was saying that it was the light-spirited poem that I thought it was in the first place. This made me wonder what was the "accepted" interpretation for the poem, which led me to this article. In this close reading of the poem, Andrew Spacey basically says that both of these ways of thinking are true. It is ambiguous which is the intended event that the speaker is talking about. This is where the article stops, but I think this interpretation can go even further. The nostalgic waltz and the drunken violence are both just as important as the fact that it's impossible to tell which it is. The line between them is blurry, and this is the central point of my interpretation. I think that it's interesting that a writer can say two things and neither of them at the same time, and this has made me appreciate poetry more. This week in AP Lit, we started off by watching the same thing every day. We listened to Ross Gay, a poet native to Philadelphia. His most common type of poem, at least from what we were watching, was the ode to the mundane. He wrote an ode to buttoning and unbuttoning his shirt, ants crawling in his mouth, etc. Usually these poems had a twist to them. For example, he wrote a poem that started out about feet and led to talking about the death of a friend. This helped me see how even the little things can be turned into a good poem. Another thing we're starting to do this week is revising our creative writing, and I think that I can use Ross Gay's poems to make my own writing better. I think part of my problem with ideas and quality when I write has to do with the fact that I'm trying to write fiction that doesn't come from my own experiences. I think even the mundane would work better if it's something that you can identify with, but according to this article, that may or may not just be my style. Since I don't write that much, it's hard to tell whether this is my style or not, but I think that experimenting with multiple writing styles is very important to becoming a good writer, and through my revision and next marking period, I will try to vary myself This week in AP Lit, we studied works of visual art to learn about how we think about literature. Part of how we learned about this was through a TED Talks video from Tracy Chevalier, who likes to create stories about the paintings she likes. Her interpretation of "Girl With a Pearl Earring" allowed me to see the portrait in a new light that I would never have seen just from the painting itself, and honestly wasn't entirely there. This made me think of the concept in poetry of the three forces that come together to create meaning: the poet, the speaker, and the reader.
Most of the week in AP Lit, we worked on visual metaphors for our summer reading, and this helped me to see the books in a new light. It helped me learn that ideas can not only be conveyed through a paper or long collections of words, but also through pictures and symbols. One problem with this conclusion, however, is the fact that we learned so much more from people presenting and explaining the intricacies of their posters than we did from the raw images themselves. For example, the fact that the palm trees on my poster were leaning apart from each other was part of the message about how different people try to avoid understanding each other, which I don't think is very apparent to someone who didn't know that already. This could be chalked up to most of our inexperience with visual communication, but even art museums often have descriptions of what the pieces meant to convey. The metaphors we drew had meaning because we gave them meaning, which ties in well with the idea of the symbol in literature. We know or can infer what they mean from experience or explanation, but they allow us to find meaning in concise wording, just as we show our meaning in a concise picture. This article explains excellently the significance behind the conciseness of symbols. The fact that many symbols are used in so many books lets readers learn the ins-and-outs of certain tropes, helping them to see these intricacies that others would have to have them explained to. Just as we explained the significance of the details in our metaphors, our reading experience helps explain the significance in the details of new things we read. The second week has come and gone and in AP Lit we learned how to read a poem in a new way. Instead of just reading once and moving on, it is important to think about a poem in order to understand it better. I already knew how to read a poem effectively from previous classes, but the TP-CASTT idea of Title, Paraphrase, Connotation, Attitude, Shift, Title, and Theme was a different way of looking at it. Shift in particular was something I hadn't been specifically taught to consider when reading poems, but it was something that was worth noting when reading. I was specifically taught shift, however, when writing essays. An essay, and any piece of writing, for that matter, shouldn't end in the same place it started because then the reader would understand the entire piece right from the very beginning.
I started school this week, and it was rather neat, I guess. This year holds some significance since it's my last year of high school. In AP Lit we started the year with an introduction to the year, as one would expect. However, it seemed to be more about how us students were before than it did the year to come. We did a lot of things that had to do with our recent and current reading habits and experiences so that both the teacher and I could see what we need to work on over the coming year. We learned about reading rates this week, a concept I had already been doing over the summer to see how long it would take me to read the summer reading books. Overall, this first week has made me think about reading and writing in new ways, which I expect will be the standard for this school year. For example, the teacher said that reading and writing isn't limited just to reading and writing books and papers, it's everything that uses words, such as messaging friends and even watching movies. This has strengthened the idea in my mind that reading and writing doesn't mean getting ideas across through long paragraphs and books, it's communication in general. Every piece of communication has thought put into it, and is part of the global story that How to Read Literature Like a Professor talked about. All of this learning and realizing has made me eager for this trimester and year. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |