Reflective Essay

Reflective Essay

           

            Throughout the first quarter in Creative Writing I have learned many things about poetry that I had not known before. For instance, you can break the rules while writing poetry, while before I was always taught to follow the steps in poetry. I learned how to use my imagination and develop different types on stories in my mind to write down a poem. I learned how to workshop others poems without trying to be rude about it, but to be a guide and a help for others. Throughout the first quarter in Creative Writing I’ve made many different types of poems in which mean a lot to me, or just are for fun and for the class itself.

            Starting off in Creative Writing the first poem we wrote was called “Where I Am From Poem.” This poem was meant to describe ourselves to the class, and we even brought in a picture that described that story. I thought that being my first poem it wasn’t my best one I could’ve wrote, but as the year went on my poems got better. As we read our poems to the class, I was first nervous because I hate sharing things that I write with others. But as the year went on I started to become comfortable with the students in my class and it doesn’t really bother me anymore. While during work shopping I was always unsure of what to write on the papers because I didn’t want to sound rude and have someone change their poem, but once I starting to do them more I understood the difference between helping and just being rude.

In my opinion I thought my Epistolary Poem was one of my best ones. I decided this maybe because it was a personal poem for myself, and my love for my grandpa. While I felt the Sestina poem I wrote wasn’t really one of my best poems either. I feel this because the length of it was extremely long compared to what I always do and the repetition of rhymes that had to be in there. I thought in general that the Sestina Poem was just harder to keep a focus on because you had all these rules to follow while writing it. I feel that my writing throughout the different poems has changed since lower grades when I first learned about poetry. That’s probably because I’ve gotten older and have learned a lot about poetry to actually write good poetry. While I had no clue you could break the rules in poetry, it was nice to know you don’t always have to follow all of the rules.

            While we started our SLAM poetry unit we watched a movie called, “SLAM.”  Seeing that it was about the power of words it also was about how the criminal justice system isn’t always fair to people. While Raymond was caught in the scene of a shooting, he was not arrested for that, but put in jail for the possession of marijuana. While his time in jail he poured out some different types of raps. Which is what we call SLAM poetry, it basically is a bunch of lines with emotion and rhyme.

This whole quarter taught me how to better understand how to write poems.  You can in fact break the rules in poetry and be more creative in your writing, as well as professional of it. Also how to correctly work shop someone else’s work without talking negative about their work.