Hi all,
This week we’ve continued discussing more awesome poetry from some great authors. We started off the week on Monday with a Meter and Terminology Exam, just to make sure we remembered all the terms and scansion skills we practiced last week. We also talked about some poems by Native American author James Thomas Stevens. Then that evening we attended a reading by James Thomas Stevens and several other Native American poets and prose writers in Gaylord Hall. It was especially cool to listen to them read because one was Colorado Coffee’s very own Byron Aspaas, who read a short piece from his memoir. A lot of us had no idea Byron was a writer, and were entranced by the beautiful and personal stories he shared with us.
On Tuesday we did a cool project with imagery. Jane gave us this poem, “City Limits” by Joseph Hutchison, and asked two people to draw on the board the image they pictured in their heads while reading the poem. It’s a beautiful description of the relationship between cities and the natural world. Here’s the poem:
Mary and Kai drew on the board for us. This is Mary’s image:
And this is Kai’s:
Both images highlight different aspects of the poem and represent the imagery in different ways. Which image do you feel most connected to after reading the poem? Would you draw your own image differently?
We spent the rest of the week focusing on metaphor, and on Thursday had a great discussion about Sharon Olds’ “Sex Without Love.” Olds uses metaphors of dancers, ice-skaters, religion, and runners to describe people who have sex without love. This poem is wonderful because it does what great poems do: it comes close to saying the opposite of what it says. The speaker of the poem seems to disapprove of people having sex without loving their partner, but she also talks about those people in terms of strong and reverent metaphors, using words like “beautiful,” “great,” and “true religious.” Ultimately, however, she suggests that despite the power and pleasure that can be attained by loveless sex, those people, whether they know it or not, will ultimately end up a “single body alone in the universe.”
Last but not least, on Thursday we also kicked off Project Poetry, a competition we invented inspired by some of my classmates’ love of Project Runway. We brainstormed and came up with several sets of creative constraints, then voted on our three favorites:
In order to compete, everyone has to write at least one of the three poems. We’ll submit them on 4th Monday and have some senior poets come into class to judge and pick the winners. Jane will be our Tim Gunn to give us advice and help us out as we go, and the winners of each category will get a prize! (Exactly what that will be is TBD.) So look forward to more info on Project Poetry come 4th week! (I’m sure everyone will be quite secretive until the day comes for the competition.)
Happy snowy weekend!
O
