Not That Bad

When Ms. Clinch first told us that we were about to start a poetry unit, I secretly panicked inside. I have never been able to completely analyze poems the way that the teacher and even the other students have, and knowing that complete analysis is needed for this class, the poetry unit seemed like a difficult unit to cover.

But I’ve learned over the past week that I can find almost anything in a poem and write a semi-solid response on it.  There are so many ways that the poet both visually captures the poems central theme by using various word structures but also the specific words that can be the ultimate piece of understanding the poem and it’s so what.

My favorite poet that we have read in class so far is e.e cummings. I like that he goes against everything that English professors pick over. Nothing is capitalized and words seem to be randomly thrown around, while the stanza’s structure is so diluted that there seems to be no meaning. But every single piece of the poem has a meaning. In the poem in Just, only two words are capitalized, and even after an entire class period discussing it, a proper answer wasn’t formed.

I used to not like that poetry had no answer. That even after a lot of thought and discussion, the true meaning that the poet was trying to convey is never properly struck down. But after last semester of intense analysis, I enjoy that I can take a different meaning from the poem and not be entirely correct. And seeing all the small things that the class picks up is very interesting and adds to my own thoughts about the poem as a whole.

When Ms. Clinch stated that we would have a timed writing on analyzing a poem, my heart did sort of drop though. I did not believe that I was ready to jump into the deep end of completely analyzing a poem for myself. How would I be able to come up with my own ideas and write a solid essay without the help of Ms. Clinch or my fellow peers?

When I walked into class Friday, I was dreading writing this timed writing. I looked at the poem and had a literal pity party for myself for at least a minute, but then I looked at it, read the prompt and started analyzing the prompt. I soon started to see how the structure of the stanzas was leading me to believe one thing about the poem, and that led me to see another aspect of the poem that I had missed in the beginning. Before I knew it, my poem was marked up and I had questions scattered around the margins that would help me write this timed writing. It wasn’t as difficult as it seemed and I realized that poetry isn’t as terrible as it first seemed merely a week ago.