The other day in class we read a poem that literally had no overall purpose to it or message. This was a change of pace compared to high school. In high school every piece that we read we always had to interpret it and figure out the meaning of it. This piece you could take whatever meaning you wanted from the poem. No line truly connected with other, so you could just one line that you really related to and just say that was the overall message of the poem. Maybe that is wrong, but it is what I did for the poems I read. We were challenged to try and create a no message poem ourselves. I picked a glue stick and tried thinking of the most random things about the glue stick. What really threw the person off was the last line. Maybe the point of these poems is to build up an idea in the first part, and then just blow that idea up either in the last line or in the last section. Or maybe the purpose is to drive people mad and make them ponder the meaning of the poem when there is no meaning. Hmmmm. Oh well.
Monday, November 19, 2012
No Message Poems
The other day in class we read a poem that literally had no overall purpose to it or message. This was a change of pace compared to high school. In high school every piece that we read we always had to interpret it and figure out the meaning of it. This piece you could take whatever meaning you wanted from the poem. No line truly connected with other, so you could just one line that you really related to and just say that was the overall message of the poem. Maybe that is wrong, but it is what I did for the poems I read. We were challenged to try and create a no message poem ourselves. I picked a glue stick and tried thinking of the most random things about the glue stick. What really threw the person off was the last line. Maybe the point of these poems is to build up an idea in the first part, and then just blow that idea up either in the last line or in the last section. Or maybe the purpose is to drive people mad and make them ponder the meaning of the poem when there is no meaning. Hmmmm. Oh well.
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This assignment really frustrated me because every past teacher I've had would give us poems that had a certain message and with this author there wasn't a clear meaning behind any of her poems. I like how you chose one line that you connected with. I wish I would have done that instead of trying to make sense of the entire thing.
ReplyDeleteThis is true in high school I would always have to answer opinion questions but my opinion was wrong in the eyes of the grader. If I did not think what the grader thought then i would have gotten the question wrong.
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