Poetry Unit Refection

1. What did you learn about poetry this unit? How?

I learned that some new poetry vocabulary that has helped me bring in new properties in my writing. Things like alliteration and refrain were some things I wasn't familiar with. Alliteration has helped me create most of my sound effects in this unit. I learned these words by filling in the rubric I was given to help me learn new properties in poetry. Also from the poems we like handout viewing great poets work  made me think about how I write. I think this made me add more imagery in it so I could sound a little bit more like poetry I have read. Exploring other writers work has always changed my methods to learn new tricks to make clever poems.

2.Where did you get your ideas for your poems?

Most of the time my ideas are from things going on in the world because I listen to the news on the radio a lot. I wrote about elephants escaping a cage because my family has always thought against animal captivity and I thought it was worth something to write about and it seemed like there were lots of things to learn about what goes on other than what is seen on stage. I also like to look into the near past and future and see what is going on then and I thought about some recent camping trips I went on with my dad seeing lots of running streams and stopping by them to eat and sometimes seeing pollution in the streams and a good amount of sad poisoned death. My first poem was about a project in art that I saw from another class of paper snowflakes with the sun streaming through the holes of the cut paper. I just like to write about things I hear an see.

3. How did you make your poems good?

When I am going over my first draft of a poem I try to add a lot of details and that is when I put the meaning in it. It is like I am trying to fill everything in to make it sound right. When I am doing this I have to repeatedly read it out loud to myself to figure out what word will fit best. I never feel hesitant to use a thesaurus because they can be extremely helpful and I depend on it a lot to find different words. My favorite sensory elements to use are sensory and sound because by using those words the sound effects of the poem come naturally to me and I think smell is an awkward sense.

4. Why did you write your poems?

I wrote my poems because I wanted to address what has been going on in the world and what has been making me happy lately. I just like to write about whatever comes to mind certain subjects over multiple poems don't really interest me. I really don't care about the meaning so much as what the poem sounds like and what its using to describe the object. It isn't always the meaning in the poem but what it says.