Poetry! Yay!

For the first week back to AP Lit our class’s main focus has been Poetry! Yay! Poetry out of all the subjects in literature is by far my favorite, there are so many theories and ideas that each poet displays in their poems, and I love diversity and the unpredictability that poems present. With so many ideas and concepts that must be followed when reading poetry often mislead students into having negative feelings toward the poetry unit, but when you think of each poem as puzzle I believe it makes it a bit easier to piece together the poet’s feelings and image that he/she wants to portray. Through the industrialization of the world, the is need for an outlet of emotion and beauty and throughout time poetry has allowed writers to thrive and create beauty that almost everyone can relate to, this is what attracts me to poetry. Throughout my life music has been very important and reading poetry to me is like reading out song lyrics, when reading a poem I try to find a the best instrumental music that correctly portrays the poets tone, mood, and overall emotion toward the moment in time he/she is writing about.

The whole focus of my blog this week is making it known that students can learn to like poetry. I promise its bark is far worse than its bite, coming from a high school senior I have had my fair share of moaning and groaning about poetry, but when you get into your fourth year of learning about poetry it kind of grows on you. Now I am so intrigued at that fact that our class is going to spending so much time on poetry. Compared to some the units first semester, I’m glad we have finally started poetry. Our teacher has given our class really good tips when it comes to analyzing poetry, which was also a major help when writing our first timed writing. What I also noticed with these tips was that they don’t only really apply to poetry they can help when reading other literary material.

So tip number one to analyzing poetry look for the obvious: find the easys- punctuation goes along way when analyzing poetry, it is one of the most over looked things, punctuation can completely change the way a poem can be read. It can also give indication that the poet meant to use the structure of the poem to portray the tone and mood of the poem. Tip number two: make sure you always come up with strong questions about the poem before jumping into analyzing it, this really help when identifying the moment in time that the poet is writing about. Tip number three: Look for repetition and reoccurring images, this can help the reader determine the poet’s main opinion and tone toward his or her topic. Finally tip number four: look for the life moment the poet wants to focus on and make sure you know his or her tone toward the moment, this makes finding a “so what” so much easier.