Poetry!

Untitled

Sometimes he visits me

A mute apparition

But with a whisper of his name,

He dissolves into nothing.

Never a smile

Never a coded message

Until the day I walked across a stage,

And moved my tassel the opposite side

He appeared before me,

Words of spun gold tumbled from his mouth

“Well done.”

Fractures

It started out with two

Until a dream sprouted

Then two became four

Sand slides through a glass,

Pressure fractured one

Leaving only three

Until with the coming dawn

There was only one left

Poetry Exercise

This is the poetry exercise we did today in class....my brain still isn't working...hmmm

ENGL 495: Multigenre Literacy in Global Context
Poetry: Creative

Complete the following creative writing (poetry) exercises. 

1. Alliteration and Assonance Lists

Create a list of word pairs and phrases that are built around alliteration or assonance. Remember, alliteration is when words in close proximity start with (or contain) the same consonant sound (as in pretty picture). Assonance is when words in close proximity echo vowel sounds (bent pen). Try to come up with at least ten of each. 

Alliteration: Pink purse, bucking bronco, Beautiful brat, Crazy cat, Demented demon, Dirty door, She sales sea shells by the sea shore, Stupid stories, Breaking Bad, Dangerous dude,

Assonance:  dream team, boob tube, youtube, fright night, steep feat, mellow yellow, free tree,

2. Metaphors for Life

Make a list of significant life events – birth, death, graduation, marriage, having children, starting your own business. Next, come up with a metaphor for each of these events. Remember: a metaphor is when we say one thing is another thing. A simile is when we say one thing is like another thing.

Metaphor: Life is a dance.

Simile: Life is like a box of chocolates (as a metaphor, this would be life is a box of chocolates)

Tip: Choose metaphors that are visually interesting. Metaphors for life as a dance or box of chocolates are both concrete and easy for readers to visualize.

Death: Dying is the next big adventure

              Marriage:  Marriage is a marathon

                  Marriage is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle

Graduation:  A college diploma is a license for a job

                    Having Children:  Having children is climbing Mt. Everst

                      Having children is like the movie Nightmare on Elm Street

Staring  your own business:  starting your own business is a nightmare

                                              Staring your own business is like poker

                              

3. Lyrics and Musicality

Choose a catchy song that you enjoy and rewrite the lyrics, but stick to the rhythm and meter. Try to go way off topic from what the original lyrics were about. You can play the song while you work the exercise or search for the lyrics online and use those as your baseline. The idea is to get your mind on the musicality in your writing.

This is to the tune of "Little Sister" by Elvis Presley

Brownie sundae, don’t you

Brownie sundae, don’t you

Brownie sundae don’t you taunt me with your fudge,

And say your very nice

 for me to eat

Brownie sundae, don’t you

Make me eat your fudgy self

I walked into the town market

To pick up a new bowl

when I passed the deli

Dancing on the counter

You tried to get me to eat you

Whenever I need to eat something

You want my attention fast

I can’t eat what’s easy

I need what is healthy

But just this one time will do

Well I ate you for my breakfast

When I was a little kid,

Now that I’m much older,

We can’t be such good friends

Diabetes is what you will give me

Rough, rough draft of my poetry analysis essay

Identity, Otherness and Isolation Found in Nature

Emily Dickinson’s poem “This is my letter to the world” reflects on personal identity, otherness and a tremendous sense of isolation.

Dickinson doesn’t strictly adhere to one metrical form. She alternates between iambic tetrameter and tri-meter respectively. The poem itself is only 8 lines, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CBCB. However, the simplicity of the form is overshadowed by the complex subject matters. The narrator never explicitly states their identity: are they male/female? Nobility or of the poor working class? The lack of evidence concerning who is speaking to us draws one to conclude that perhaps knowing who they are isn’t important; knowing that they are, is. Yet, I cannot help but feel conflicted as to whether or not this personal consciousness of self can be described as rooted in strength. “This is my letter to the world,/ That never wrote to me,…To hands I cannot see…Judge tenderly of me!” The repetitive use of the personal pronoun draws the reader’s attention as if there was a spot light illuminating the narrator’s consciousness, demanding that we acknowledge their existence; “I live” our narrator seems to scream. If the speaker feels confident in their personal identity, they should not feel the need to draw attention to themselves. They should not feel as if they need for us, as readers, to explicitly recognize them. And yet, we as people cannot go through our lives without feeling as if we matter in some fashion. Is the narrator strong for admitting this weakness?

Some people think that a key concept of self is in evaluating who you are in relation to others. The speaker of “This Is My Letter to the World” does this by highlighting how they are different compared to the rest of the population. He or she is writing a letter “to the world” despite the fact that “the world” has blatantly ignored their existence. “Nature” has told the rest of the populace something that is described as being “simple” and overflowing with “tender majesty”. The speaker is aware that some form of communication is happening between the people they are surrounded by, and yet is unable to “see” this message that is so essential that it is “committed to hands” of those who hear it. Despite the reaffirmations that the narrator makes concerning their identity, complete with declarations of “me” and “I” and not of “we”, it is clear that it is only the speaker that is isolated in some form from the rest of the world.

Why this isolation is occurring is not expressly stated. An argument can be made that a clue lies within the word “countrymen”. The poem’s speaker makes it clear that they are an “other”, out casted by Nature , who is described as being female. Nature is speaking directly to the “countrymen” and is intently ignoring the speaker. If we take the word “countrymen” literally, we’ve isolated an entire gender, which suggests a lack of a united female community. If Nature is a woman, why is she only speaking to men? But this argument can’t hold because the speaker has not stated a kinship that could be found in the pronoun “we”; isolation is not found in an entire group of people. The isolation is intensely personal.

Hello

Hello! My name is Michelle Zamora (Ortega, if I ever get around to changing that). I'm currently a senior at my university. I hope Spring 2013 will be my last semester, but hiccups happen. I am in an English Subject Matter program; I had aspirations in becoming an English teacher but I'm currently having serious reservations concerning that. In any event, I love reading and I love working with kids (so far) although I've had very limited experience. But I digress! Throughout my educational career, I've noticed that media has played an increasingly important role in the classroom. With the current advances in technology, it's almost impossible to not have it involved in the learning process. I am not tech savvy. I prefer good ol' paper and pen when drafting essays before I translate it into a word document. Even when I feel especially creative, I always reach for the tools with which I first learned to write. I did not grow up with a computer and find that its been difficult for me to adapt. But with kids these days, its almost unnatural for them to not have some sort of electrical device.

I'm honestly conflicted with this fact. On the one hand, not everyone learns the same way which makes it essential to have a variety of learning opportunities at a teacher's disposal. Technology is predominant in almost any job field, so it makes sense to have computers, etc. be second nature to the coming generations. Technology is becoming more and more reliable, but I find that when it doesn't work, the world stops until it is up and running again. In a speech course I took, my professor used Youtube to show the class examples of speeches for us to imitate. The occasional power point would find its way on the projector, which I was usually so wrapped up in reading that I didn't always hear what the professor was saying (and if I think its important to have a copy of it, then I'm busy scribbling it all down). But when these weren't working, then my professors would spend a significant amount of time trying to get it running, cutting time out from our learning process. Problems have become more slim over the years, but I guess I'm not a visual learner. I prefer conversation, lecture to having visual stimuli. But that's just me.