“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart”
-William Wordsworth
Hi everyone,
At the time I wrote my last blog we were still doing a lot of looking at other people’s poetry, but over the last 6 weeks we’ve started focusing more on our own. At the end of last term, we had a couple of weeks to really experiment with our poetry, find our own style, and see what we like to write about. Once we got into this term, it was time to really start working on our assignment in our groups, and plan what we’d be doing for the next 6 weeks.
After the Brisbane’s writer’s festival, I was pretty inspired to start writing my own poetry, but in the next lesson, when I sat down in front of my computer, ready to write a perfect poem first go, I realised I was a little bit lost. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, or how I wanted to write about it, but that’s what the end of last term was all about for me, improvement. While my first few poems were a little bit rocky, and didn’t flow quite as well as I would’ve liked, as time went on, I found my style, and writing poetry because easier, and more enjoyable. Through this experimental time, I found that the style of poetry I like writing best is rhyming slam, which became really helpful this term for our task.
This semester, our task is to create a poetry performance about a certain issue, in groups of 3 and 4, which incorporates our own poetry, others poetry, facts and statistics, and talking. The issue my group has chosen is women’s equality throughout time, I am writing a poem about women in the 1800’s, and the three other people in my group are writing it about 1900’s, 2000’s and 2100’s. So far, I have a rough draft of my poem ready for editing and some changes, and still have to write the talk to go with it, find some extra poems and hopefully write one more poem. Our goal is to show the improvements throughout time, and try to express what women’s lives were, are, and hopefully will be like, and to share the stories of women who never got to do it themselves.
So now, here’s my thoughts, in every blog I ask the question of why we turn to poetry at key moments in our lives, and throughout this entire unit, it seems the more I learn about poetry and poets, the less clear the answer is, however, after doing some thinking, another possible answer I’ve come up with is to tell the truth, and to understand. Through poetry, you can tell the truth in ways you couldn’t normally. You can tell the truth just through the emotions you express, or you can tell a story through your poems. Poetry helps you understand. When you read a good poem, you feel like you can understand what the other person is thinking and feeling, and when you write poetry, you understand what you are thinking and feeling, and you process that. Poetry is permanent, and when a poem is written about a moment in time, that moment can be relived over and over again, by millions of different people, forever, just by reading it.
Dakota's Blog 