My Thoughts on Poetry

We just listened to a couple of guys perform a poetry slam.  I was pretty blown away actually.  I have seen slams on T.V. shows and movies and they seemed pretty lame to me, but seeing it in person was a completely different experience.  I am amazed that people can be that talented in their writing.  I am seriously thinking about going to a slam now.  As far as the poetry that we have been reading in class I have a little more respect for it.  Reading that paper on how to read it helped some, and the discussion on the wheel barrow poem helped.  I do not think that poetry writing is for me though. I promise that I will be more open to it and not roll my eyes when I see it, but as far as writing it I think I will leave it to the professionals. 

How to read Poetry.

This helped me change my bad attitude about poetry a bit.  I am the kind of person who gets easily frustrated trying to understand it.  This paper made me feel better by stating that you aren't going to get it the first time you read it and just because you don't understand it doesn't mean you are stupid.  One thing it emphasized was that you need to ask questions about the meaning.  In class we discussed the red wheelbarrow poem.  My first thought was that this is a pretty lame poem.  I couldn't believe someone would publish this and people liked it.  As the class discussed it I noticed that the other students got more from it than I did.  It was pretty impressive.  As they told their feelings I could somewhat put it together better.  One thing that will probably confuse me is that everyone is going to get something different out of it.  That makes me feel like you are taking away from what the author intended.

Where I lived, and what I lived

I guess a person would say that this guy writes beautiful.  I'm sure he does, but I was lost almost the whole time I read it.  Somewhere I got that he was talking about living a simpler life.  My opinion of this is if you want people to live a simpler life then you should probably write it so the "not simple" people can understand it.  I did like paragraph 15 when he said, "It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and meduim through which we look, which morally we can do."  Now I do not exactly know what that means (and yes I have been thinking about it) but for some reason it just stuck out to me