5/15

Today we revised our papers.  I feel that we got alot acomplished with this.  I think something that i need to improve on is just stating what i think about the poem and why.  The reason this is hard for me is because i try to avoid using I and sounding like an elementary schooler. I think once i figure out a way to say what i think about this poem it all should come together nicely.

This week we have been writing our poem analysis papers.  I have been writing about the poem Diving into the Wreck.  The poem is about a woman who has entered a sport that is dominated by men. she goes onto to describe by using metaphors.  she talks about her equipment and how it relates to body armor or  absurd flippers, and how she needs them to survive underwater. 

Ryan Green-Battle Royale

We read the short story Battle Royale in class. It was an excellent piece of writing. I liked it because it brought into the story some history. What fueled the story was the history behind it. The story took place during the Civil Rights time period. The story takes place in a white mans gentlemans club, and the entertainment is having young black males beat eachother up blindfolded. The white men absolutely loved it. Ralph Ellison is the author of the short story, and he also is reflecting back on his experience being a black during these time periods. He was a smart kid. He went to the gentlemans club in though of recieving a scholarship. However, he was tricked by the white man into fighting in the battle. He was dehuminized by the white man. The blakcs were treated quite cruely. In the short story, what is common throughout is the theme of racism, clearly. Racism was common and was part of society during that time period. In Battle Royale we get to experience an experience that a black man had during this brutal time.

5/9 blog

Well going into this week i really had no idea on what poem that i was going to write about.  That was utill i read to poem the Fish.  I liked this poem alot because it related to my and my family's lifestyle alot because my dad takes charter fishing parties for a living.  This poem desribes every part of the fish as good as possible giving you a great image of the fish.  The most important thing is that he describes verything as in a good way.  This is very important to me and my family bussines because charter fishing isnt always about how many fish you catch it is about injoying yourself and seeing things you dont always get too see.  So seeing all the beautiful trait of the fish means so much that no normal people can pick up on.  I am looking forward to seeing where i can take this paper.

Ryan Green- Cinderella

We read the poem "Cinderella" in class. It was a quite interesting poem. It took the real Cinderella story, the one we all no as kids, and it remade it in a more bloody way. I thought it was interesting to see the differences that these two stories had even though they were the same poem. In class, we did a quick summary on it and an analysis. We then later presented our work to the class which was pretty cool. I also learned that stories for children use to be bloody and dark to scare little children into being good. I never knew that before, and i liked how i ingested that new knowledge.

Barbie Doll

Barbie Doll:

This was a very interesting poem because it shows the beauty of a girl's childhood. A little girl that lived in her dream world filled with happiness and everything she ever wanted. At this age she probably never once thought of how she looked in the mirror or her appearance to everyone else around her. This childhood  state of innocence soon crashes with one magic word of puberty. The growth of a child to a young woman soon transforms this young girl's view of the world. Everything this girl does is based upon looks. She only takes into account the negative aspects about herself that she sees including her great big nose and fat legs. This poem of self depreciation shows how a lovely child full of life digresses into a sad girl who takes her personal image so greatly to heart that it leads her to her deathbed. The scary part about Barbie Doll is that the timeline of events in this poem are not uncommon. Girls living in modern society today face problems such as anorexia and would prefer to be extremely unhealthy just to look a certain way. Today's image is based solely on what is seen in media, that beauty is hardly ever taken for what it is worth.

Selected Poetry

This week’s two poems that I enjoyed most were “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, and “Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman.

            First I thought Frost’s poem was very enjoyable because I saw it as a what-if poem. Almost, like he went back in time to a point in his life and had two different roads he could’ve take. And he says how he took the less used one and doesn’t regret it one bit. This poem almost inspires me to do what he did and decide to take the harder road less travelled and do what I want, that’s why I connected with it.

            And next was the Whitman poem about a spider in the middle of nowhere just casting his web trying to grab hold to anything. I saw this as someone who is at a lonely stage in their life and they are just searching for anything, or anyone to have in their lives. This was somewhat of a depressing poem to me but really powerful just due to that thought of being a small lonely spider, in such a vast, but empty world.

Blog #8

For tonights poetry readings I particularly liked The Road Not Taken, Shakespeares Sonnet 18, and A Noiseless Patient Spider. I liked Frosts "The Road Not Taken" because of its first person perspective and its intricate descriptions of nature. You can imagine the scenery that the author describes, he is in a yellow forest and is trying to decide which path to take. I also found some of the figurative narrations interesting such as roads. There are the roads we walk and drive on and the roads that we take in life, and for every road we take, there is the road that we dont take. The road splitting in the woods is a metaphor for choice. The narrator also can't see all the way down either path, which is true to the metaphor, because we can only see so far into the future with the choices we make. In the end of the poem the narrator claims that by taking the road less traveled it has made all the difference, meaning that the road the speaker took has had a significant impact on his life.

Nick Rose

     Looking at the poem "Questions my son asked me, Answers that I never gave him" the are many examples of connotation, for example when the son asks "could we xerox the moon?" he father gives him the first commandment in another form. Also when the son asks many of his questions his father gives him a question as an answer, this is, in my opinion a bridge between connotation and denotation, it is connotation because the questions are easy to answer, and the right answer can be thought of relatively quickly, but it denotation because the answers are exact, for example "can bread go back to the field of its birth?" this answer to this is no, and if we looked up the question that the son asked "will the sleep in my eye roll up into my head?" we would find the answer to be no. Many of the stanzas bridge the gap between the two, and this causes the poem to be very interesting. 

Nick Rose

Blog 8

The poem “question my son ask and the answers I never gave” was a poem I really enjoyed this week. I like how the author gave spiritual answers to question ask by a young boy. I think the other tried to show how people are afraid to use god as an explanation for simple question ask by are loved ones. I also think the author wanted to show how a complex answer can change the meaning of the question be asked. I believe I was able to understand this one better than the other poem because I’m religious and have been trying to spiritual in my day to day life lately