Both sides of the poetry spectrum...

I found myself thinking about my ex-roommate during our class the last couple of weeks. She was a creative writer, and I was “the lit kid,” as she would call me. I read and then wrote based on what I had read and researched, but she just wrote. She would sit at her lap top, hours on end, whispering and murmuring the lines and words she juiced out of her just to finish the assigned poem or short story that was due the next day. The reason why I’ve been thinking of her is because of the in-class assignments we’ve been working on. I think—no believe—that had she taken a more hands-on approach during her writing process as we did recently in class, she would have enjoyed her undergraduate years for more than just a time of “blood, sweat, and tears,” as she calls them. I think that creating poetry actively and engaging more creative senses than just writing (like pasting, cutting, and coloring) would have helped her tremendously, and most important of all, it would have made her writing process much more enjoyable.

As the “lit kid,” I am used to reading and analyzing poems. I’ve also (like many of us) been introduced to the ‘technical aspect’ of poetry: the breakdown of lines, stanzas, rhythm and rhyme. I’ve also been introduced to the conventional, classic and contemporary poems and have had to analyze the content, context and devices used by the author to create the poetry. However, besides the odd creative writing class I’ve taken here and there, I’ve never really been introduced to the techniques or tools that could help me create poetry. I was always just expected to spit out a piece of work onto the page. I think that activities like these would help students not only become engaged within the class and with poetry, but I think the activities will help them gain a sense of control, because oftentimes, the hardest part of writing poetry is not knowing where to begin, or where to end.